Serving UIC's Great Cities Commitment: Solutions for Today's Urban Challenges

More about the talk:
Most scholarship on Black communities in urban areas in Britain at the end of the twentieth century are dominated by a focus on London, where Black communities were overwhelmingly post second world war immigrants from the West Indies – along with their British-born children – living across multiple neighborhoods.  Black families in London were primarily comprised of two West Indian parents (rather than inter-racial marriages). But in Liverpool most people in the Black community were long-term citizens and residents with some families dating back generations or centuries; most Black people were African, or in families of mixed African-white parentage; and 90% or more of the Black community in the city lived in one segregated neighborhood. Most state and city policies – in employment, housing and schools – were designed to help recent Black immigrants and their children assimilate (for example, providing funds for schools) rather than helping long-term Black residents of Liverpool combat endemic racism.  How did these dramatic differences arise? How were they manifested by the end of the 20th century? How has the city government responded to the Black community in Liverpool? And how does an analysis of Liverpool deepen and broaden our understanding of urban areas in Black Britain?

More about the author:
Stephen Small, PhD. is a Professor in the Department of African American Studies and African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley where he has taught since 1995; and he is Director of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues (since June 2020). He earned his Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley (1989); his MS.C in Social Sciences from the University of Bristol (1983); and his B.A. (honors) in Economics and Sociology from the University of Kent at Canterbury (1979). He researches the history and sociology of Black people across the diaspora. His most recent book is entitled: In the Shadows of the Big House: 21st Century Antebellum Slave Cabins and Heritage Tourism in Louisiana (2023). Recent publications include 1981: Black Liverpool Past and Present (2023) (co-written with Jimi Jagne); 20 Questions and Answers on Black Europe (2018). He is co-editor of Black Europe and the African Diaspora, 2009. His next book on Black Culture in Liverpool in the 1970s-2000s will be published by Liverpool University Press in 2025. Stephen was born and raised in Liverpool – the city with the nation’s longest-standing Black population.

Event Details:
Date: Thursday, December 12th, 2024
Time: 12 PM to 1:30 PM Central/Chicago Time
Location: Great Cities Institute | 412 South Peoria St, Suite 400, Chicago, IL 60607

If you can’t make it in person. Here is the link to join us via a zoom webinar.

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).