Making Urban Research Intellectually Respectable

Introduction

In October 1958, Martin Meyerson (1922–2007), Frank Backus Williams Professor of City Planning and Urban Research and Head, Harvard’s Center for Urban Studies, and Lloyd Rodwin (1919–1999), Associate Professor of City Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Director, MIT Center of Urban and Regional Studies, received word that the Ford Foundation had approved a five-year, $675,000 grant (the equivalent of $5 million in 2011). This money would enable them to unite their two research centers, as a “cooperative enterprise of both universities that combines the activities of their present Centers of Urban Studies.” They called it the Joint Center for Urban Studies of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University (Joint Center; Figure 1 ). ¹

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Figure 1.

Lloyd Rodwin (left) and Martin Meyerson (right) examine a model of Ciudad Guyana, one of the projects undertaken by the Joint Center. (Source: Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

After the Joint Center’s official start-up in early spring, 1959, Meyerson and Rodwin spent the next five years shaping it as a “discover of and stimulator of talent, generator of ideas and a clearinghouse for scholars and funds.” ² In short order, they rented office space, organized weekly lunch seminars attracting rafts of faculty, student and visiting scholars, many of whom stayed as Fellows, pre- and postdoctoral students. They produced thirty monographs and reports, crafted a publication agreement with the Harvard and MIT presses that yielded ten books with ten more in development by 1964. ³

Among the books were Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City (1960), Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot (1963), Sam Bass Warner’s Streetcar Suburbs (1962), Edward Banfield and John Q. Wilson’s City Politics (1963), Martin Anderson’s The Federal Bulldozer (1964), William Alonso’s Location and Land Use (1964), Bernard Frieden’s The Future of Old Neighborhoods (1964) and Charles Abrams, Man’s Struggle for Shelter in an Urbanizing World (1966). Extraordinary offerings, these books made fundamental contributions to urban research. For example, Beyond the Melting Pot, overturned current thinking in sociology and political science with its dissection of urban ethnic group behavior. Location and Land Use undergirded urban economics as it blossomed in the 1960s and 1970s. Image of the City transformed theory and practice in urban design and environmental psychology. The Federal Bulldozer fueled a national debate about urban renewal. Man’s Struggle for Shelter raised consciousness about a still troublesome worldwide problem: the inability of national governments to house their people.

By 1960, Meyerson and Rodwin had secured additional funding for the Center, the most notable, a million dollar, three-year project advising the government of Venezuela on building Ciudad Guayana, a resource-based new town in the country’s interior. Today, the city’s population numbers a million. As guided by Meyerson and Rodwin, this project would stimulate scholarly assessments of regional economic development and new town design that form the foundation of today’s thinking on these topics. The work includes: Lisa Peattie’s The View from the Barrio (1970), Planning: Rethinking Ciudad Guayana (1987), partially reprinted in Jay Stein’s Classic Readings in Urban Planning (2004), and Lloyd Rodwin’s “Ciudad Guayana: A New City,” Scientific American (1965), Planning Urban Growth and Regional Development: The Experience of the Guayana Project in Venezuela (1969), and Nations and Cities: A Comparison of Strategies of Urban Grown (1970). ⁴

As will unfold below, the story of the intellectual and institutional environment and early days of the Joint Center reflects an important era in American planning history. It illuminates the development of seminal urban-focused research, knowledge that informs today’s planning theory and practice. Three phenomena influence the story. First, in the immediate postwar period, key intellectual leaders, including higher education administrators and foundation heads, began to recognize the need for stronger research in many areas, including the social sciences. The scientific advances in the defense industries during World War II as well as a growing desire to promote peace and democracy through new knowledge inspired their views. To this end, they embarked on strengthening a modern brand of scholarship, targeting significant government and foundation funds to university-based interdisciplinary centers and institutes dedicated to the systematic exploration of international affairs, communications, electronic and nuclear developments, and urban issues. Second, from the 1940s, Martin Meyerson, along with Lloyd Rodwin, identified, developed, and nurtured an ever-widening network of financial supporters, political allies within and outside the university, productive urban-focused scholars and practitioners whom they called upon to shape the Joint Center. Third, a nimble administrative team, Meyerson and Rodwin promoted a purposeful (sometimes opportunistic) vision for the Joint Center that led to its becoming the preeminent source of new knowledge in city planning and urban studies in a critical five-year window from 1959 to 1964, accomplishing this feat when many other leaders of urban centers failed to do so.

Postwar Environment for Urban Research

Basic and applied research focused on the redevelopment of cities enjoyed a resurgence in the 1940s and 1950s. Many factors contributed to its growth, but two stand out: first, the slowdown in public and private real estate investment during the Depression and World War II hit cities hard and, second, a rising consciousness of urban blight, shortages in affordable housing, and the general obsolescence of city’s capital stock parallel with accelerating suburbanization disadvantaged cities. These conditions stimulated scholarly publications and research studies, the formation research centers devoted to urban issues and the initiation of a number of degree programs in city planning to train practitioners and researchers to address postwar metropolitan development.

In the area of publications, professional journals like the Journal of the American Institute of Planners, naturally gave attention to cities and urban redevelopment. But other journals, not necessarily concerned such issues, also recognized their importance. For example, throughout the 1940s, the Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics (renamed Land Economics in 1948), regularly published landmark articles focusing on cities from important (or soon to be important) contributors. (This journal was the last vestige of the Institute for Research in Land Economics and Public Utilities, founded in 1922 by the father of land economics, Richard Ely (1854–1943) and the “chief if not the only link, particularly in urban land and housing to … later work at other universities and government agencies.”) ⁵ Exemplary were works by Robert Weaver, then Community Services Director, American Council on Race Relations (on the discriminatory effects of restrictive covenants on urban residential property), Lloyd Rodwin, then a research assistant in the Department of Economics, University of Wisconsin (on urban industrial location and the failings of garden cities), Homer Hoyt, veteran land economist (on redeveloping cities after the war), Charles Abrams, lawyer and housing expert (on subsidized urban housing), and others. ⁶

Major research efforts focused on cities also emerged and resulted in pioneering publications that would later inform Joint Center initiatives. In 1947, the National Bureau of Economic Research, urged by its Exploratory Committee on Financial Research, undertook a six-part Urban Real Estate Finance Project under the supervision of Columbia University Professor Ernest M. Fisher and his research assistant, Chester Rapkin. Between 1950 and 1953, it yielded seminal works by Fisher who identified the existence of multiple markets within cities (Urban Real Estate Markets), Columbia economist C. Lowell Harriss who painstakingly analyzed urban lending practices of the Homeowners Loan Corporation based on 4000 cases—coded, punched, and tabulated with the most up-to-date techniques of the day (History and Policies of the Homeowners Loan Corporation) and former Federal Housing Administration officer, Miles L. Colean who looked at “the many-sided and often conflicting facet’s of government’s influence …. [to] appraise the general direction of the legislative process” (The Impact of Government on Real Estate Finance). ⁷

A parallel effort, the Urban Redevelopment Study (1948–1951) underwritten with $100,000 from the Spelman Fund of New York given to the American Society of Planning Officials (ASPO) and the National Association of Housing Officials (NAHO), focused on blight elimination. Directed by housing economist Coleman Woodbury, assisted by William Slayton, who later served as the first head of the Urban Renewal Administration, it generated two massive, now classic volumes, The Future of Cities and Urban Redevelopment and Urban Redevelopment: Problems and Practices, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1953. Contributors, who were among the nation’s top thinkers and activists in the area, offered translational research and included housing reformer Catherine Bauer, G. Holmes Perkins, then a Penn dean, writing from his experience as a staff member of the National Housing Agency during World War II, Alan Twichell, former technical secretary for the American Public Health Association’s Committee on Hygiene of Housing, Jack Meltzer, Field Supervisor, Housing and Home Finance Agency (HHFA) in the Division of Slum Clearance and Renewal and former staff member, Office of the Housing and Redevelopment Coordinator, Chicago. ⁸ Martin Meyerson, working in Chicago at the time of this study, would have been very aware of it.

Research institutes with urban interests were also emerging and Martin Meyerson, either through personal experience or general knowledge of their leaders and their work, would have been very familiar with many of them. Although united by their common interests in urbanism, each had a distinct approach. In 1941, Princeton University began a Bureau of Urban Research focusing on disseminating information about current urban issues. Typical was its 1943 five-part lecture series, “Cities in Transition—The Causes and Consequences of Metropolitan Decentralization,” that featured University of Chicago’s Phillip Hauser, architect Henry Churchill, urban real estate consultant Homer Hoyt and others. ⁹

In 1942, with start-up funds from the Arthur F. Bemis Foundation, MIT created the Urban Redevelopment Field Station, headed by Frederick J. Adams and later by John T. Howard. ¹⁰ (This entity seems to have faded away with no indication of its work being given in the dean’s reports after 1949.) It analyzed various methods of urban redevelopment, “especially the rehabilitation of rundown residential neighborhoods, using Boston and other cities as laboratories. ¹¹ A notable study brought attention to Boston’s South End and provided the data for its becoming the site of one the nation’s largest urban rehabilitation efforts in the late 1950s and 1960s. ¹²

In 1948, with $100,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation, Columbia University founded the Institute for Urban Land Use and Housing Studies headed by the land economist Ernest M. Fisher, a former student of Richard Ely. ¹³ With a grant from the Bureau of Public Roads, Fisher hired Robert B. Mitchell, founding director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission (1942–1948), as Research Professor to supervise a study on the systems and structures of traffic. With Chester Rapkin, Fisher’s former research assistant, Mitchell studied transportation and land use in Philadelphia, work that yielded the pathbreaking Urban Traffic A Function of Land Use (1954).

In 1952, President Harold Stassen of the University of Pennsylvania allocated funds for an Institute for Urban Studies to be created in parallel with the formation of a Department of Land and City Planning in a new Graduate School of Fine Arts, placing both under the jurisdiction of its dean, G. Holmes Perkins. Perkins (who had relinquished his Charles Dyer Norton professorship at Harvard where he had been chair, Department of City and Regional Planning [1945–1951] before coming to Penn in 1951) was actively transforming design education at Penn by adding city planning and landscape architecture to its traditional architecture offerings. As part of the process, he asked Robert B. Mitchell for advice about the planning and research units. Mitchell counseled that the relationship of a planning education and an urban research center should be likened to that of medical school and hospital: “planning schools have lacked the counterpart of a teaching hospital.” Continuing, he observed, “it could be approximated in a teaching and research center where the appropriate scientific resources of a great university are pooled to give continuing attention to the manifold problems of the city while advancing basic scientific knowledge.” ¹⁴

In initiating the department and institute, Perkins hired Mitchell to run both, allocating a budget of $35,000 to the Institute and $30,000 to the department. ¹⁵ In the ensuing years, the Institute was a magnet for young researchers from many fields, including sociologists Digby Balzell, Herbert Gans, and Janet Abu-Lhugod (the latter two recruited from the University of Chicago); transportation expert Wilfred Owen (recruited from the Brookings Institution); land and housing analysts Chester Rapkin and William Grigsby (both recruited from Columbia); landscape architect Ian McHarg (recruited from Harvard); and city planners Martin Meyerson and John Dyckman (both recruited from the University of Chicago) and William L.C. Wheaton (recruited from Harvard). ¹⁶ They formed a network of colleagues whose paths would cross in many arenas, including the Joint Center.

In 1956, when MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning Dean Pietro Belluschi (1950–1965), reported on the successful formation of its Center for Urban and Regional Studies, he was marking the end of a four-year process. It began in 1952, when the planning faculty recruited Louis Bemis Wetmore’36, Chief, Planning Division, Rhode Island Development Council, to start a research center, that came into being unofficially, a year later. ¹⁷ With Wetmore as head, assisted by Walter Isard, Associate Professor, the center undertook projects funded by the U.S. Department of Commerce and the University of Puerto Rico. When Isard resigned to accept a position in the Department of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania and Wetmore left to head the planning program at the University of Illinois in 1955, the center fell dormant. However, the next year, a University-appointed visiting committee reviewing the city planning program recommended the revival and elevation of the center to an Institute-sanctioned entity reporting to the central administration. ¹⁸ Subsequently, the Institute formally approved the center, naming Lloyd Rodwin, Associate Professor, as its head and relieved him of two thirds of his teaching duties to develop the center.

In 1957, two new urban studies centers emerged, one at Harvard and the other at the University of North Carolina. Little documentation exists for the Harvard Center for Urban Studies except that Harvard hired Martin Meyerson to direct it. The UNC’s Urban Studies Center came about at the urging of city planning faculty member, F. Stuart Chapin. He convinced the Institute for Research in Social Science, the nation’s oldest multidisciplinary institute (founded 1924) to incubate it until 1969 when it achieved financial independence and was renamed the Center for Urban and Regional Studies. ¹⁹

In response to the growing demand for professionals to deal with urban redevelopment and suburbanization, several universities started planning programs, increasing the number from three in 1940 to 22 by the mid-1950s. ²⁰ These programs had larger student enrollments than the earlier ones—a typical pre-war MIT planning class was five or six students; Martin Meyerson’s city planning class at Harvard had one other student besides him, William Wurster. ²¹ Most new programs, lodged in schools of architecture, pursued a design-heavy curriculum. In contrast, the MCP/PhD Program in Education and Research in Planning at the University of Chicago took a different approach. Masterminded in 1945 by anthropologist Robert Redfield, Dean of Social Sciences, and sociologist Louis Wirth, Assistant Dean, it was a shared cross-division program that drew on departmental resources for instruction and governance. ²² It aimed to train researchers as well as practitioners with competence in the social sciences. Further, its coverage of regional, resource, and national planning in developed and developing countries would distinguish it from others. In 1946, Redfield and Wirth convinced President Robert Hutchins to recruit Rexford Tugwell, then governor of Puerto Rico, as its head. ²³ As a class of 31 students enrolled in academic year 1947–1948, Tugwell hired additional faculty including Martin Meyerson and Edward C. Banfield, both of whom had shared appointments in the undergraduate college. ²⁴

Within three years, the program began to fall apart. It lost its champions when Redfield stepped down as dean in 1946 (and was replaced by one less interested in planning) and Wirth died prematurely in 1952. Furthermore, neither the Divisional leadership nor the departments shared Tugwell’s vision of a program having a large number of full-time faculty. ²⁵ Budgetary problems arose in 1951 when the University’s Board of Trustees, likely urged by the new dean, called for the withdrawal of university funding for the program after 1953. Finally, Tugwell’s resignation as head of the program that same year and his replacement by Harvey Perloff, an untenured faculty member, contributed to a feeling of general instability.

In 1955, the University closed the program pointing to detailed internal review that alleged:

Planning as an academic discipline is not a unitary field…. it is difficult to distinguish scholarly research in planning from the research done in economics, sociology, geography or political science. At present, planning represents more an attempt to apply the social sciences, jointly, to particular problems than a unique and substantial body of knowledge or theory.

The University awarded fifty-eight Master of Arts in Planning and six doctorates; many of its students like Britton Harris (ABD), Lowden Wingo (MA 1950), John Dyckman (MA 1951), John Friedman (MA 1951, PhD 1955) and others who interacted with the program, like Herbert Gans (MA in Sociology ‘50,), would go on to be leaders in the field. ²⁶ The circumstances of its closure had a profound influence on all involved, including Martin Meyerson who, recruited by Mitchell and Perkins, had departed to Penn in 1953 yet, as a former faculty member, was pained by the lack of respect accorded urban research and scholarship at Chicago. He vowed to change the situation.

Ford Foundation, Harvard, and MIT in the 1940s and 1950s: The Meyerson/Rodwin Milieu

When Meyerson and Rodwin began planning the application to Ford, they did so against the background of intellectual and institutional ferment related above. ²⁷ The two men had a strong bond, having been students at Harvard at the same time, but this was the first project on which they collaborated. ²⁸ They quickly became a formidable team sharing their professional networks and having complimentary interests in housing, urban and regional economics, urban politics, and urban design. Together, they traveled to Ford’s New York City headquarters to visit with Henry T. Heald, who was Ford Foundation president (1956–1966) and a former colleague of Meyerson from Chicago and Paul Ylvisaker, Executive Associate for Ford’s Public Affairs Program (1955–1967) who, along with Rodwin, was a former Littauer Fellow at Harvard in the mid-1940s where both earned their doctorates; Ylvisaker in political economics and Rodwin in land economics. ²⁹

As Meyerson and Rodwin put forth an ambitious plan, calling for $1 to $1.6 million over six years to pursue research in twelve areas, ranging from international regional development to local city planning, they easily enlisted the support of their respective deans and presidents. For example, Harvard Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, thirty-eight-year-old McGeorge Bundy endorsed the proposal in a letter to Ylvisaker, boldly declaring: “our aim is to establish an international center for advanced research, for documentation and for stimulating interuniversity efforts and collaboration in the urban field.” ³⁰ While president of MIT Julius Stratton, as a Ford trustee, would have recused himself from any direct participation in the foundation’s decision making, his very presence on the Board, made him silent supporter.

Meyerson and Rodwin were confident that their proposed center would be compatible with Ford’s grant-making objectives. The foundation had recently undergone a massive transition from a small, local grant-maker to a force for innovation. Chartered in 1936 with a $25,000 gift from Edsel Ford, son of the company founder, it had become the richest philanthropy in the world at the deaths, of Edsel (1943) and his father Henry (1947) who bequeathed it a substantial number of shares of Ford Motor Company stock. In 1958, the year that the Joint Center applied for funding, Ford had assets of approximately $800 million (or over $6 billion in 2011 dollars).

In the late 1940s, Henry Ford II, who succeeded his father as the foundation’s president (serving from 1943 to 1950), commissioned San Francisco lawyer H. Rowan Gaither to help think through a new mission and goals. ³¹ A seven-member committee, composed mainly of academics with ties to Harvard, Yale, University of North Carolina, California Institute of Technology, and University of Michigan, wrote the resulting “Gaither Report,” a thoughtful 139-page document that outlined broad focus areas (promoting peace and democracy, strengthening education and adding to the understanding of man) to be supported with grants in three functional areas: research, education, and the application of new knowledge. The report also called for professionalizing foundation operations by recruiting knowledgeable, program officers to be guided by a strengthened board of trustees. ³² It contained a long, well-considered assessment of how to fund research, calling for identifying and supporting unconventional studies, finding ways to foster cross-disciplinary efforts and partnering with universities or other responsible entities to encourage multiyear research projects.

The foundation acted on the recommendations. By 1958, it had moved its headquarters from Detroit to New York City and enlisted Gaither to serve as its president (1953–1956) and later board chair (1956–1958). It hired several new program officers and proceeded to finance innovative research. (In 1956, Henry Heald succeeded Gaither as president. Ten years later, McGeorge Bundy succeeded him. Both men had strong relationships with Martin Meyerson, an important factor in the funding picture for the Center. ³³ )

Further, Ford had developed many new programs, including one in urban and regional problems, “designed to help mark out strategic points at which the problems of rapid urban growth can be manageably and productively attacked.” ³⁴ In the next twenty years, Ford spent $75 million dollars on urban initiatives, funding several research centers “to help satisfy a long-standing need for continuing centers for urban affairs” and a number of applied research projects. ³⁵ Among centers, the Joint Center received the largest grant ($675,000), but others such as those at the University of North Carolina ($425,000) and the University of Pennsylvania ($325,000) were also beneficiaries. ³⁶ In addition, Ford richly funded two demonstration projects to “consider the overall problems and plans effecting an entire metropolitan area … to overcome the drawbacks of piecemeal studies,” the Pennsylvania–New Jersey–Delaware Metropolitan Project (PENJERDEL; $900,000 matched by local funds over seven years), where Chicago graduate Britton Harris would make his name, and Southeastern Michigan Community Research Corporation ($875,000, also locally matched). Finally, it organized and provided support ($5.4 million) for a new group, Resources for the Future, a think tank devoted to environmental issues that in the 1950s had a strong presence in land use and urban and regional economics research as directed by Harvey Perloff, former head of the University of Chicago planning program. ³⁷ Of all these efforts, the Joint Center would have a disproportional national and international impact on urban studies when judged by such key outcomes as influential publications, attracting keen minds to the field and assessing links practice and theory as applied in developing countries.

The Early Days of the Joint Center

Once Meyerson and Rodwin secured the Ford grant, they developed a memorandum of understanding signed by Stratton and Pusey that outlined the Center’s mission, governance, and expected outcomes. ⁶⁴ From the outset, all envisioned the Joint Center as having multiple purposes: pursuing basic research, building “a bridge between fundamental research and policy application at the national and international and local levels, strengthening the educational programs … [making] research findings available to teaching purposes … [and opening] new research possibilities for faculty and advanced graduate students in any interested departments.” ⁶⁵ Martin Meyerson, as Director, was responsible for day-to-day leadership. MIT administered the finances. Three committees oversaw the Center’s work: an Administrative Committee (overall policy direction), Faculty Committee (academic policy and appointments), and Visiting Committee (advice and prestige). One indication of the interest of the two institutions is the composition of the founding Administrative Committee: Harvard President Nathan Pusey, MIT Vice President Carl Floe, Harvard deans McGeorge Bundy and Jose Luis Sert, and MIT deans John Burchard and Pietro Belluschi. Lloyd Rodwin chaired the Faculty Committee whose membership was multidisciplinary: the three members from MIT were: Director, Center for International Affairs; Head, Department of Civil and Sanitary Engineering; professor, School of Industrial Studies and the three from Harvard were: Dean, School of Public Health; Director, Laboratory for Social Relations; and professor, Department of Government. The Visiting Committee had many members drawn from Meyerson’s long list of professional and personal contacts: Andrew Heiskell publisher, Life Magazine, and chair of the Board of ACTION Inc.; Robert Weaver, Housing and Home Finance Administrator; Joseph C. Clark, Senator from Pennsylvania and ACTION board member; Ralph Lazarus, head of Federated Department Stores; David Rockefeller, President, Chase Manhattan Bank; and Thomas Cabot, Boston industrialist and MIT Corporation Board member. ⁶⁶

In complete agreement about their objectives, Meyerson and Rodwin immediately set about programming the Joint Center activities. They aimed to “discover and stimulate first rate talent … attract the ablest students” and be selective and strategic in deciding what policies and problems to address. ⁶⁷ Rather than pursue a single large study, they chose to distribute the funds widely, a decision that would lead to later accusations of being unfocused and disorganized from higher leadership, particularly at MIT who were more accustomed to targeted research. At one point, President Stratton wrote to Vice President Floe:

I have just had occasion to reread the report of the Visiting Committee for the Joint Center for Urban Studies held last April 12. This document reminds me of my uneasiness about the stability and progress of the enterprise. One of these days the Ford Foundation is going to ask us some hard questions and I think it is important that we be able to show that MIT at least has exercised due diligence…. This is a field in which I have no special competence… ⁶⁸

We had considerable difficulty in getting the organization to follow proper business and fiscal procedures but I believe these are now under control…. the competence, stability and progress of the enterprise is another matter … in my opinion the Center is doing both good work and poor work. It tends to hand out money to anyone who asks for it with no direction and little check on the results. Perhaps this is necessary in such a broad and “soft area of research.” ⁶⁹

It was recognized that in the first year and a half the Joint Center efforts would be deliberately exploratory. The aim was to determine what fields shall receive more emphasis in the future. Another aim was to involve a variety of disciplines from both institutions. The expectation was that some of the exploratory studies would prove sufficiently fruitful to facilitate more extended efforts through outside financing. ⁷⁰

Meyerson had worked out a policy for fund distribution assuring that exploratory research would continue and outlining five areas for support (urban transportation and communication; urban design; urban government and politics; history, structure and growth of cities; urban and regional problems of developing nations). These moves satisfied the governing committees.

Meanwhile, in a whirl of unrelenting activity, Myerson assiduously recruited prestigious scholars, many of whom had never undertaken urban-focused research, to participate in the Center. Dean Burchard led its first colloquium, “The Urbane City” (1960), and codirected, with Harvard Pulitzer-prize winning historian, Oscar Handlin, one of its first conferences, “The City in History (1961),” that resulted in the publication of The Historian and the City (1963). ⁷¹ Harvard Law professor Charles ran a conference with The Brookings Institution on Anglo-American planning practices whose proceedings also became a book. Lecturers came from all over the world to present their work at convivial Joint Center lunches. Harvard philosophers Morton and Lucia White looked at anti-urban values in the United States, publishing their findings with Harvard University Press. Harvard economist Raymond Vernon studied metropolitan issues focusing on New York. English geographer John Delafons examined U.S. land use controls, also yielding a monograph. Harvard political scientist Edward Banfield began a nationwide study of muncipal governance also published. MIT planning professors Kevin Lynch, Roland Greeley and Robert Wood expanded their research agendas with Joint Center support. Rising stars Bernard Friedan, George Sternlieb, Stephen Thernstrom, Sam Bass Warner and many others received doctoral or research funding and they all produced landmark books.

Despite these accomplishments, Meyerson did not always have smooth sailing, encountering institutional resistance to his management style (and sometimes permissive attitude to performance) at the Center. But with vision, fortitude, conviction, and a strong fighting spirit (perhaps gained from his experience with Chicago politics), he resolved each emergent issue to the benefit of the Joint Center. The first flap occurred in November 1960 when the New York Post Foundation demanded return of the funds because Nathan Glazer, who had brought the grant to the Center, had missed repeated deadlines. This was an unheard of request at MIT. Called on the carpet by the MIT Director of the Division of Research, Meyerson stood by Glazer and backed him with Joint Center funds until the completion of Beyond the Melting Pot, a monograph that became an all-time best seller for MIT Press. Similar questions arose around the Edward Banfield’s thirty-city study of municipal government and Charles Abrams's separate Ford Foundation grant to write a book on housing. Meyerson backed them both. Banfield soon produced City Politics (1963; written with James Q. Wilson) based on the reports, and Abrams produced the landmark Man’s Struggle for Shelter in an Urbanizing World (1966). A final disruption occurred as Meyerson was departing for California, the Joint Center published Martin Anderson’s Federal Bulldozer, written when he was a doctoral fellow (1961–1962). A large donor disagreed with its findings, complained to the Corporation and angrily withdrew his support, leaving James Q. Wilson (who succeeded Meyerson in 1963) to draft a response, one that reflects the open atmosphere that Meyerson cultivated at the Center. Wilson wrote that despite the fact that Anderson’s views

are highly unpopular to members of the Joint Center … it would have been very easy to find grounds for refusing the publish the book…. Because we are part of a university … we felt a particular obligation to bend over backwards to given an opportunity to people of extreme views to make their case before the public. ⁷²

But by mid-1963, with the Venezuelan project winding down and the Ford Foundation grant ending in that year, the Center faced questions of sustainability. Meyerson reported plans for its dissolution and prepared an application for renewal of Ford Foundation funding, a request that McGeoge Bundy as Ford Foundation president honored with a seven-year grant for $1.4 million (or $9.7 million in today’s dollars). By this time, however, Meyerson had moved on to the University of California, Berkeley, but the Center lived on in the spirit that he had created. The Ford grant enabled the appointment of Daniel Patrick Moynihan as Director and the continuation of the research programs through 1969.

End of the Meyerson Era

In 1963, Meyerson had accepted an offer to become dean of the College of Environmental Design, University of California, Berkeley. He would ultimately be a three-time university president: Berkeley (1965), SUNY/Buffalo (1966–1970), and the University of Pennsylvania (1970–1981). But it was at the Joint Center that he solidified his thinking on urban research, knowledge that he would apply in his other roles. ⁷⁵ On his departure, he wrote Ford Foundation’s Paul Ylvisaker:

I have spent five years organizing and running the Joint Center…. I have had one overriding objective in my work with the Joint Center, an objective shared by Lloyd Rodwin and the principle members of the Faculty Committee and staff. I want to make urban research intellectually respectable, otherwise first rate minds of the kind we have drawn to the field would not have been attracted. To a considerable extent we have achieved this objective. …Some of the ablest intellects at MIT and Harvard are beginning to turn to the Joint Center for stimulus and services. If in the years ahead, the Joint Center enhances its attractive powers for good minds (particularly young ones), it will have made a great contribution to practical urban affairs as well as to urban scholarship. ⁷⁶

Meyerson clearly achieved his objective. There are three indicators of this success. First, in little more than a decade, the Joint Center had sponsored books (33), reprints (108), funded projects (42), faculty and research associates (180), and doctoral students (78). ⁷⁷ Second, the Center greatly increased receptivity to urban focused research within the scholarly culture of Harvard and MIT. The institutions hired more faculty in the area. For example, Harvard recruited Edward C. Banfield from the University of Chicago and Donald K. Price, former Associate Director of the Public Administration Clearing House in Chicago (1940s) and Vice President, Ford Foundation (1952–1957) in 1958. ⁷⁸ MIT tripled the number of its faculty and even changed the name of the department from the Department of City and Regional Planning to the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. These changes were not lost on the reviewers who observed:

In 1959, the Center was essentially the primary focus for urban studies at MIT and Harvard. This is no longer true. Over the years, both institutions have significantly enlarged their commitment to urban science, urban technology, urban design, and urban planning, so that now there is a marked increase in the number of faculty and students in the urban field. ⁷⁹

Afterword

Over the years, the nature and functions of the Joint Center changed as urban-focused research also evolved. In the early 1970s, under the direction of Robert C. Wood, an original Joint Center Fellow and Director (1969–1970), and Bernard Frieden, the Joint Center’s first pre-doctoral Fellow and Director (1971–1975), focused on housing and associated policy issues in economics and demography. In recognition of this new direction, it changed its name to the Joint Center for Housing Studies in 1985. In 1988, it relinquished its ties to MIT, associating with the Graduate School of Design and the Harvard Kennedy School. ⁸¹