Making Urban Research Intellectually Respectable

Abstract

In 1959, the Ford Foundation notified Harvard professor, Martin Meyerson and MIT professor, Lloyd Rodwin, with happy news, the award of the equivalent of a $5 million to support a new enterprise, the MIT–Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies. In the next five years, Meyerson, as founding director, and Rodwin, as chair, Faculty Committee, would shape the Joint Center into the nation’s preeminent source of urban scholarship. By 1964, it had sponsored thirty monographs and reports, crafted a publication agreement with the Harvard and MIT presses that yielded ten books with ten more in development, and had become the architects of Ciudad Guayana, a resource-rich new town in Venezuela. This review of the early days of the Joint Center not only illuminates the development and growth of the seminal knowledge that informs today’s planning theory and practice, it also surveys the postwar relationships between foundations and universities as the nation’s institutions of higher education embarked on deep research agendas in the physical and social sciences focused on contemporary, issues, an effort advanced by substantial philanthropic support.