Anchoring (in) the region: the dynamics of university-engaged urban development in Newark, NJ, USA

ABSTRACT

While academic and policy analyses have explored universities’ roles in urban regeneration and regional development, issues arising from intraurban collaboration and competition in multi-university city-regions have received scant attention. In response, this paper examines how higher education institutions (HEIs) connect and splinter urban space at multiple scales through a case study of Newark, NJ, USA. Newark’s attempts to reposition itself as a hub for university-enabled innovation disclose the complex ways in which the infrastructures of knowledge urbanism are implemented, negotiated, and spatialized at local and city-regional scales. The study’s multi-disciplinary analysis assesses the discourses, technologies, and territorial constellations through which HEIs (re)shape place and project urban peripheries into wider city-regional networks. The paper’s findings reveal an emergent and decentred ‘de facto’ form of university regionalism crystallizing in Greater New York that illustrates the need for robust, scalar-sensitive assessments of anchor institution strategies as they are articulated within broader regionalization processes.

KEYWORDS:

• City-regions
• regional planning
• universities
• urban development
• qualitative case study
• Newark, NJ, USA

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID

Jean-Paul D. Addie http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6091-4301

Notes

1 Brand Newark itself is a project developed as part of the ‘MetroLab Network’; a group of over 35 city-university partnerships across the United States (including a New York City-Columbia University-NYU collaboration) working with the support of industry to generate and share data analytic solutions to urban challenges ranging from public service provision to environmental sustainability.

2 Including difference between public and private HEIs (Breznitz and Kenney 2018), the larger proportion of research and operating costs provided by national governments in Europe, and the reliance on, and competition for, tuition dollars in the U.S.

3 Research 1 universities are doctoral-degree granting HEIs in the United States characterized as having ‘very high research activity’ by Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. 131 universities were classified as ‘R1’ institutions in 2019.

4 Such thinking is captured in the ‘Applied Science NYC’ initiative, launched in 2010 by the New York City Economic Development Corporation (Addie 2019b).

5 Campus expansion includes the construction of student housing on a traditionally commuter campus, the relocation of Rutgers-Newark’s Business School from an on-campus location to 1 Washington Park in 2009, and the redevelopment of the Hahnes & Co. department store as a commercial-community facility.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement number 657522.