Universities as urban planners and arts patrons

Boston Globe architecture critic Robert Campbell has discovered that major universities are today’s urban planners. As city government planning offices have become underfunded and politically weak, universities have picked up the slack, extending their efforts beyond classrooms and dorms and into multi-use neighborhoods and mixed-use downtown areas. Emerging from a panel on the subject, Campbell realized the scope of the trend:

I came away thinking that universities today are like the great aristocratic families of the past — like the Dukes of Bedford, say, who in the 18th century developed their London estates into the neighborhood we call Bloomsbury. Universities today are working at that same kind of grand scale.

Their actions are worthy of being called city planning, because they involve a lot more than the creation of university buildings. Today, universities find that if they want to build at all, they must build entire neighborhoods, neighborhoods that provide jobs, housing, services, and entertainment for residents who may have no academic connections.

It’s an interesting parallel to the findings of last year’s American Assembly on ‘The Creative Campus: The Training, Sustaining, and Presenting of the Performing Arts in American Higher Education’, which found a similar analogy for academia in the arts:

Several participants at this Assembly made the case that colleges and universities are the most important patrons of the arts in the country. It is surely true that higher education, if it is not the most important patron, stands as an extremely significant patron of the arts in the United States. It is especially notable that colleges and universities provide an extremely high level of support for new and innovative artistic product. In many parts of the country, colleges and universities provide singular venues for witnessing art and most of the opportunities for creating it.

So, now universities are the new Dukes of Bedford, the new Medicis, the new Andrew Carnegies…a comparison that should thrill and terrify them at the same time.