Universities are the new city planners

Are universities becoming the real planners of our cities?

Something has happened. Cities used to be planned by professional city planners. But the planning profession as we know it arose, to a large extent, as a response to the urban renewal legislation of the 1950s and '60s, when federal funds poured into cities. Now federal money has dried up.

Planning agencies in most cities are underfunded and weak. They react to proposals, rather than initiating anything themselves. A university dean in one city told me the planning department there was ''AWOL." A prominent figure in another city used the word ''toothless."

So who's doing serious planning?

Look around.

Harvard is planning a whole new neighborhood in Allston. Columbia, already the third-largest landowner in New York, has hired noted architect Renzo Piano to help mastermind its expansion into an area called Manhattanville. The University of Pennsylvania, the largest employer and largest landowner in Philadelphia, is reaching out to revitalize the city.

I'm fresh from moderating a panel in New York on the topic ''Universities as Urban Planners." 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.

In today's populist America, no institution can get away with bulldozing a chunk of the city for its own sole purposes, as did Boston's Christian Science Church or New York's Lincoln Center when they obliterated neighborhoods. A university today must prove it will be a congenial neighbor. If it can't, no community will allow it in.

My panel was sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Penn and Columbia were both represented, Columbia by its president, Lee Bollinger, and Penn by its senior vice president for facilities and real estate services, Omar Blaik.

Columbia and Penn are good examples of the two ways in which universities currently do planning. Columbia wants primarily to expand. Penn wants primarily to revitalize the city that surrounds it.

Bollinger argued with great eloquence that universities have always expanded and, therefore, always will. Columbia -- like Harvard -- sees its problem as one of overcrowding. With the fewest square feet per student of any Ivy League school, Columbia feels it must have more room.

One greets this argument with some skepticism. Art museums, too, seem to feel a natural mandate to expand. So do hospitals. The drive to grow may derive as much from ambition as need. It reminds one of manifest destiny, that dogma of the 19th century by which white Europeans felt they had a God-given right to take over the American continent.

At Penn, the problem isn't so much the need for more space, although Blaik accepts Bollinger's natural law when he says that ''we grow 50 acres every 75 years." The urgent problem at Penn was safety. The university was trapped in the middle of a dangerous, badly deteriorated neighborhood. A student murder made the university wonder whether it could even survive. It responded by reaching out to revitalize its surroundings.

Faculty didn't want to send their kids to the local public schools, so Penn, on its own land and at its own expense, built a new public school. It provided its own police. It partnered with local business to generate housing, restaurants, and cultural facilities. ''We used to be a fortress," says Blaik. ''Now we see retail around us as a safety measure."

Penn's record is impressive, but not untypical. David Dixon, an urban designer with the firm Goody Clancy in Boston, points to Ohio State and the University of Cincinnati, among others, as institutions that faced similar problems in their environs. Both reached out, like Penn, to ally with private groups to revitalize the city.

Why do universities keep growing, though, when the student body generally isn't? They list several reasons:

One, universities can't get research grants unless they offer better facilities. New technologies require new buildings.

Two, there's intense competition among elite schools to attract a shrinking demographic pool of students. That means the schools must entice youthful prospects with new amenities, social, sports, and cultural facilities, even dorm rooms big enough to hold all that media equipment. ''You need entertainment and nightlife, or you lose both faculty and students," says Blaik. ''You need an engaged, vital, and vibrant community."

Three, universities attract private spinoffs that want to locate near them. That's an indirect kind of university expansion, but an important one. The biotech companies near MIT are a local example.

Four, universities are being pushed by some cities, notably Boston, to house more of their students, in order to relieve pressure on the housing market.

''We have accepted our role as planners," says Blaik, pointing to a planning award Penn won from the Urban Land Institute.

In a way, universities are the industries of today. They've replaced the manufacturing that has almost disappeared from US cities. A university imports raw material in the form of 18-year-old minds and bodies, processes that material, and four years later ejects a finished product that is ready for the market. Education is today's equivalent of the production line. It's an economic boon to any city.

Universities are thus moving into the vacuum left by the fading of strong municipal planners. City planners, in the era of Boston's Ed Logue, were proactive. Now they are reactive. Lacking funds and power of their own, they try to spin public benefits off private developments. An example is the Fan Pier project on the South Boston Waterfront. City planners inform prospective developers that they must, at their own expense, create a vast underground parking area, build the streets and sidewalks and maintain them in perpetuity, install and maintain the utilities, and design, build, and maintain the public parks. Every one of those things would, in the past, have been handled by the municipality, at public expense.

It's not a surprise that no developer currently wants the Fan Pier. But universities are taking on projects of comparable scale.

The American Academy hopes to hold a symposium on this same topic in Boston in 2006, dealing with our local universities. It should be fun if it goes ahead.

Robert Campbell is the Globe's architecture critic. He can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.