May the Light Shine Bright for David C. Perry

We wish to extend our deepest condolences to the family of David C. Perry. David passed away on Monday afternoon, December 2, 2024. Dr. Perry served for almost 12 years as Director of the Great Cities Institute and the Associate Chancellor for the university’s Great Cities Commitment. He was also a Professor of Urban Planning and Policy in the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs from where he retired in 2018.

Perry is the author or editor of eleven books, including two recently published volumes titled The Global University and Urban Development: Case Studies and Analysis and Universities as Urban Developers: Case Studies and Analysis, and over 150 articles, book chapters and reports on urban “anchor” institutions, urban and regional economic development policy, race, politics and urban violence, contested cities, public infrastructure and the production of urban space. Perry’s work has appeared in such non-academic places at the New York Times, The Nation and Metropolis magazine. David worked with numerous community partners and served on national and local public boards and commissions, including Chicago’s Zoning Reform Commission, the Urban Land Institute’s National Public Infrastructure Committee, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the Rudy Bruner National Award Selection Committee, the National Task Force on Anchor Institutions and the Strengthening Communities Strand of the Coalition of Urban Serving Universities of the Association of Public Land Grant Universities.

Professor Perry received his Ph.D. from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University and went on to teach in the Government Department at the University of Texas at Austin and chaired the Urban Planning Program at the University at Buffalo. He also held the visiting Albert A. Levin Chair at Cleveland State University and was a senior faculty fellow of the State University of New York’s Rockefeller Institute.

We invite you to view David’s Debra Friedman Lecture at the University of Washington, Tacoma from 2014.

David will be missed and may he rest in peace.

Books (Selective)

• • The Second Century: Community Foundations as Foundations of Community (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming 2014). Co-Editor and author with Terry Mazany.
  • The University as Anchor Institution: From Enclave to Urban Institution (M.E. Sharpe, forthcoming 2014). Author.
  • Global Universities and Urban Development: Comparative Perspectives (M.E. Sharpe and the Lincoln Institute, 2008). Co-Editor and author with Wim Wiewel.
  • The University as Urban Developer: Case Studies and Analysis (M.E. Sharpe, 2005). Co-Editor and author with Wim Wiewel.

• • D. Perry and F. Gaffikin, “The Contemporary Urban Condition: Understanding the Globalizing City as Informal, Contested and Anchored,” Urban Affairs Review, (forthcoming, 2012).
  • D. Perry and W. Wiewel, “The University as Anchor:  From Enclave to Urban Institution’” Urbanistica, (forthcoming, 2012).
  • D. Perry, “The Great Cities Commitment: Leadership, Resources, Rewards and the Identity of the Urban Research University,” MetropolitanUniversities, (Fall, 2011).
  • M. McEldowney, F. Gaffikin and D. Perry, “Discourses of the Contemporary Urban Campus in Europe: Intimations of Americanization or Globalization?” in Global Societies in Education (Fall, 2010).