About Us
Founded in 2010 with generous support from SAGE Publications, URBAN is committed to strengthening relationships between academics and community-based practitioners, connecting traditionally siloed issue areas, and creating mechanisms to increase scholarly recognition of this work. URBAN builds on the work of Marilyn Jacobs Gittell, a passionate and engaged teacher and scholar whose long career of pioneering community-based urban research to inform social change is the inspiration for this effort. URBAN is a multidisciplinary, distributed network of scholars and practitioners committed to articulating and strengthening the collaborative methods and impact, sharing findings, raising the visibility, developing career pathways, and increasing the acceptance within the academy of community-based research. URBAN creates physical and virtual spaces where thinkers of all stripes, academic and non-academic, can explore, debate and share lessons, with the ultimate goal of becoming a robust source of new scholarly work.
Mission & History
URBAN focuses on exploring the issues and challenges that face cities, large as well as small. We remain committed to this focus, even as we know that issues of oppression and social inequity afflict communities of all kinds, rural and suburban as well as urban. In turn, both urban and rural communities respond to such challenges with a rich array of strategies that emerge out of their unique institutions and social networks. Whether we are examining food security, the criminal justice system, education funding, or a host of other issues, we appreciate that lessons from communities of all kinds can lead to deeper understanding that benefits everyone. Just as it is advantageous to bring multi-disciplinary lenses and systems-thinking to bear on a range of core issues, it can be useful to conceptualize them in geographically broader terms as well. Furthermore, while our analyses begin in urban spaces, the research, policy advocacy, and organizing that we undertake may extend across and beyond urban centers.For these reasons, we welcome the participation of our colleagues whose community-engaged work focuses on rural, regional, or other communities, and we invite them to join our meetings, to use the resources on the URBAN website, and to contribute their own, so that together we can promote a more just and equitable society.
Marilyn Jacobs Gittell (1931–2010), in whose memory URBAN was launched, was a scholar-activist from New York City fiercely committed to racial, gender, and educational justice, and especially known for her dedication to school decentralization. Joining with the black community’s school decentralization movement of the 1960s, Marilyn threw herself into one of the most polarizing and important matters of the day: New York City’s “Ocean-Hill Brownsville controversy” – a Brooklyn-based social experiment that moved the control of neighborhood schools to the socially marginalized African American communities whom the schools purported to serve.
A small group of doctoral students in Critical Social/Personality Psychology at CUNY Graduate Center have been charged with the privilege of constructing the Marilyn Gittell Archive. They are working through boxes of materials from Marilyn’s life, as well as collecting both official records and everyday details “beyond the storage unit,” to create two, intersecting exhibitions – one digital, and one material – that honor Marilyn’s work as it speaks with/in the collective struggles and radical potentials of education in NYC – past and present.
FOUNDING MEMBERS
- Caitlin Cahill, Assistant Professor, Environmental Psychology, City University of New York and Assistant Professor, Urban Sociology, Kingsborough Community College
- José Z. Calderón, Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Chicano/a-Latino/a Studies, Pitzer College
- Cathy Cohen, David and Mary Winton Green Professor of Political Science and Chair, Department of Political Science, University of Chicago
- Michael Dawson, John D. MacArthur Professor of Political Science and the College, University of Chicago
- Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Professor of Geography, Doctoral Program in Earth and Environmental Sciences, City University of New York
- Ross Gittell, Chancellor, Community College System of New Hampshire
- Lani Guinier, Bennett Boskey Professor of Law, Harvard University
- Lorlene Hoyt, Director of Programs and Research, Talloires Network, Tufts University
- Kathe Newman, Associate Professor and Director, Ralph W. Voohees Center for Civic Engagement, Urban Planning, and Policy Development, Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, Rutgers University
- Beth Richie, Professor of African American Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, Criminology, Law and Justice, and Sociology, Director, Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy, University of Illinois at Chicago
- J. Phillip Thompson, Associate Professor, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Abel Valenzuela Jr., Chair, Professor of Chicana/o Studies, Urban Planning, University of California, Los Angeles
- Mark R. Warren, Associate Professor, Department of Public Policy and Public Affairs, McCormack Graduate School, Graduate Program Director, University of Massachusetts Boston