TownGown World : Town and Gown University Communities 

Time to break the town-and-gown barrier
Feb 2008 CAN

Rather than as an "engine" of development, then, think of the university as an ecosystem or infrastructure for a knowledge-driven, creative economy. The key to the future lies in building stronger bridges between universities and their surrounding communities. The old town-gown boundaries must dissolve until it becomes impossible to see where the university ends and the community begins.(Full Story)

Old Blue Gives Back
January, 2008  USA

Yale is commendably sharing its wealth with students and staff by tripling financial aid and offering the most generous homesteading grants of any university.

New Haven's largest employer has lured more than 800 faculty and staff into buying homes in the city with $5,000 down payments and annual grants. Yale is now increasing the grant from $2,000 a year for 10 years to $2,500 a year.

It's a gown/town bargain that benefits everyone. Yale gets stable neighborhoods around the campus. The city gets homeowners who pay taxes, mow their lawns, coach Little League and create healthy communities. Homeowners get up to $30,000 in grants. For most, it's their first home.
The university is the largest property taxpayer in town. It has resuscitated the heart of the city and is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into renovation and revitalization, on campus and off.

Ivory tower? More like a dream developer. (Full Story)

No Ivory Tower on this Campus
Globe and Mail
Jan 2008, Canada

Any recital of Things Torontonians Take For Granted About Their City, the University of Toronto and its pastoral setting has to get main billing.One of the world's top universities, it occupies 68 hectares in the heart of downtown Toronto.And yet, despite its size and its status as an elite university, it is neither overbearing nor elitist, instead blending into the city in a way that is described by virtually anyone who has ever thought about it as "seamlessly."

"You have an urban university a couple of kilometres from the main financial city core, accessible on foot, by subway, by mass transit, in a real neighbourhood with functioning shops and residences where people live, work, learn and play," Richard Florida says as he crosses University Avenue at College Street.

"If you asked me to name the most unique thing about Toronto's spatial structure, its geography, its regional urban character, it's this. It's the fact that it has a world-class university that is a seamless part of its geography. There are very few cities and universities in the world that can say that." (Full Story)

Yale and New Haven Find Common Ground
Dec 2007, USA
AS a former real estate developer, Bruce D. Alexander is particularly well positioned to lead Yale University’s effort to improve downtown New Haven. On a recent tour, he crowed about the city’s revival as a destination for urban shoppers and suburbanites out for a night on the town, and was quick to promote the city’s thriving restaurant scene. Mr. Alexander’s boosterism is just one facet of a well-financed program that over the past 14 years has transformed Yale from the punching bag of New Haven politicians and community activists into a welcome partner in the city’s revitalization. The change in attitude was ushered in by Richard C. Levin, an economics professor who became the university’s president in 1993.

Mr. Levin was determined to end the longstanding battle between town and gown. He did so by brandishing Yale’s financial might and intellectual firepower to invest in the city, for the mutual benefit of the school and its environs.(Full Story)

Town-gown triumph : In poorest part of Worcester, Clark University helps put children on path to College
Nov 2007, USA
At the University Park Campus School, a small, brick middle and high school in the poorest part of the city, students all but grow up on the Clark campus, just a block away. The grade 7-12 school is the centerpiece of Clark's determined campaign to revive a neighborhood long blighted by poverty and gang- and drug-related violence.
In the past four years, nearly every graduate has gone on to college, radically defying the odds for inner-city students. In turn, the neighborhood is rebounding, stabilized by working families drawn by the promise of a college education for their children.

University Park, which Clark helped found a decade ago and oversees in a partnership with the city, has earned national recognition for its striking success in overcoming the achievement gap between urban and suburban schools, among the most persistent and pervasive problems in American education. (Full Story)

When the Gown Devours the Town
Nov 2007 USA
Are universities gobbling up New York City? A panel discussion organized by the Municipal Art Society tackled this subject last week: “When the Big Get Bigger: New York’s Universities and Their Neighborhoods.” James Traub, a contributing writer for The Times Magazine, moderated.  The discussion, held on the evening of Nov. 6 at Rockefeller University, was part of the society’s exhibition “Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York,” on view until January.
Judith Rodin, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation and the author of a new book, “The University and Urban Revival: Out of the Ivory Tower and Into the Streets,” was the first speaker.Dr. Rodin argued that universities play a critical role in cities as engines of economic development and as major employers. Sadly, she added, “in the name of redevelopment,” universities have often contributed to “the destruction of the neighborhoods around them.”(Go To Article)

Uni and the community - new directions for public engagement
Oct 2007 UK
The idea of universities as active stakeholders in their local communities will be discussed at a Universities UK conference on Thursday 25 October.
Entitled “Uni and the community - new directions for public engagement”, the conference will look at how universities can manage studentification and how the benefits that students bring to university towns and cities can be fully nurtured.“We need to turn the debate from how to manage the downside - minimising or mitigating negative student impact in university towns and cities - into how to manage the upside – finding and nurturing the mutual benefit between a university and its host community.(Go To Article)