In Chicago today the largest campus for higher education contains neither ivy nor lawn. There are no frat houses or sororities, no neo-Gothic dining halls, and no carillon bells chiming the hour. There are no gates to signify entrance into its territory. Indeed, its boundaries are diffuse and ill defined. What has come to be known as “Loop U” is really an agglomeration of institutions of higher education woven in and around the streets and buildings of the southern end of the city’s historic business district, the Loop. It is the fastest growing “campus” in the city today, a reflection...

In 1862, Thomas Jefferson’s concerns for higher education were extended with the passage of the Morrill Land Grant Act, which allocated a share of revenues from the sale of lands in the public domain to establish agricultural and mechanical institutions. Its significance lay not only in the way it opened higher education to a larger number of the nation’s citizens, but also in the way it joined the nation’s two greatest resources—its land and its population—during the early stages of the industrial revolution. The mandate of these land-grant universities was to provide research, teaching, and extension services with...

The end of the nineteenth century is notable for the development of the disciplines and sciences of urban understanding within the context of the city’s lack of fixity. Jane Addams, herself a well-trained rhetorician, relied on the flexibility and ambiguities of developing Chicago to locate new spaces for action and interaction.¹ But the city and culture surrounding the Hull-House settlement were changing. As Gregory Clark and Michael Halloran stated, “The theory of rhetoric taught in the schools [in the first half of the nineteenth century] and the practice of public discourse sustained outside them were transformed during the nineteenth century...

The post–World War II American city was a space at once unsettling and full of promise. The late 1920s to the late 1940s had been a period of stagnation; lack of maintenance and funds for improvements and growth during the Great Depression and a reprioritizing of the economy during World War II had left the physical fabric of the cities in a state of decay. To add to these deteriorated conditions, in-migration, particularly by African Americans looking for industrial jobs in northern cities, and the return of war veterans led to overcrowding. Yet new ideas of urbanism, articulated prior...

The new interstate expressways of the mid-twentieth century vastly changed the orientation of the nation’s metropolitan regions, but they had an equally enormous impact on local geography. Chicago would be tethered to this system by a series of expressways, three of which intersect just to the west of the center of the city in the very location where the 1909Plan of Chicagocalled for the building of a vast civic center. The then newly named Circle Interchange cuts the central area of the city into four quadrants, with the Loop, or downtown area, occupying the northeast quadrant. In the...

Chicago Circle Overview,an informational film produced in 1965 to introduce the new University of Illinois at Chicago Circle (UICC) campus to the student body that had been housed on Navy Pier, illustrates the extent to which the campus was valued because it was to take advantage of everything “new”: “It has been called a model for the modern urban university,” the film states (Figure 5.1). In this modern university, technology would be used in new ways as aids to instruction. In this instance, a film rather than an actual tour would serve as a mechanism for student orientation. The...

Mayor Richard J. Daley considered the building of the campus at Chicago Circle to be one of his greatest accomplishments as mayor, on a par with the new expressways and public housing, modern, monumental answers to urban decay.¹ Speaking at a luncheon to celebrate the campus in October 1965, he hailed the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle (UICC) as “the first university to be created out of slum and blight.”² Even as it was being built, however, the educational and urbanistic principles on which it was founded were coming under attack. Nationwide, students were protesting, not just against the...

A long with challenges coming from within academia, new technologies and research opportunities, global economics, and urban dynamics—including new movements to revitalize cities—are putting pressures on urban campuses not only to expand but also to engage in large-scale real estate development.¹ In the 1990s, the group of industries categorized as education and knowledge creation ranked second in the United States, after business services, in the number of jobs added, as most manufacturing industries continued to decline. As one report on cities and their universities stated, “In many respects, the bell towers of academic institutions have replaced smokestacks as...

Marilyn Jordan Taylor’s description of the design for Columbia University’s new Manhattanville campus could equally describe the qualities of urban space and interaction occurring today in Chicago’s South Loop: the interpenetration of campus and city not only enabled by chance location but purposely created and promoted through design.¹ The narrative of the case study of Chicago that forms the core of this book, the story of how its universities have contributed to the production of new urban organizations and ideas and how the city has informed the creation of new campus spaces and forms, is situated within larger national trends...