Transforming Communities with the Resilience Dividend

This is an excerpt from ULI’s book, Visionaries in Urban Development, which profiles the first 15 years of the ULI J.C. Nichols prize, the Institute’s highest honor. The 2014 honoree is Dr. Judith Rodin, who recently spoke at the ULI Global Trustees and Key Leaders Midwinter Meeting. Next year’s Nichols prize winner will be announced at the Fall Meeting.

West Philadelphia’s University City neighborhood is an active place, even between semesters at the University of Pennsylvania, the area’s anchor institution. On an early August morning this past summer, people strolled along Walnut Street next to the university’s campus, some stopping for coffee at one of several sidewalk cafés. Cyclists headed up and down Walnut’s dedicated bike lanes. Shoppers were stocking up at the Fresh Grocer at Hamilton Square, and customers browsed in the university’s expansive bookstore at University Square. Up and down the street, restaurants were gearing up for lunchtime.

Related: Dr. Rodin’s Speech at the ULI Global Trustees and Key Leaders Midwinter Meeting

With the start of Penn’s 2014 fall semester still more than two weeks away, it is a safe bet that many of those who were milling about on Walnut that day are residents and university employees. The stores and restaurants along Walnut are part of their community; these are the places they go to pick up groceries, meet friends, or just relax. And their neighborhood would soon be enlivened considerably by the 24/7 activity of Penn students who live in the neighborhood or who live on campus and consider the neighborhood an extension of the university.

The transition of Walnut Street from a boundary separating Penn from the city into a seam connecting the institution to the city is the result of an extraordinary effort set in motion nearly 20 years ago by Dr. Judith Rodin, now president of the Rockefeller Foundation and who served as president of the University of Pennsylvania from 1994 to 2004. Dr. Rodin’s steadfast commitment to create positive change transformed Penn’s relationship with the community, and it guides her current work in creating thriving communities around the world.

The tremendous positive impact that Dr. Rodin has made on people’s lives globally—starting with one university neighborhood—has earned her the 2014 Urban Land Institute J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development. The Institute’s highest honor, the Nichols Prize recognizes a person, or a person representing an institution, who has demonstrated a longtime commitment to the creation of communities that prosper by providing a high quality of life for all residents and which reflect the highest standards of design and development. The $100,000 prize honors the legacy of Kansas City, Missouri, developer J.C. Nichols, a founding ULI member considered to be one of America’s most innovative entrepreneurs in land use during the first half of the 20th century.

“The Nichols prize exemplifies people who have made a difference in their community, and Dr. Rodin has done that extremely well,” says Nichols Prize jury member Mark Johnson, president of Civitas, an urban design and landscape architecture firm in Denver. “She has shown a career-long commitment to breaking barriers and changing perceptions about how to improve a community.”

“Dr. Rodin is on the leading edge of community building,” notes Nichols Prize jury chair James D. Klingbeil, chairman and chief executive officer of Klingbeil Capital Management Ltd., a national real estate investment and management company based in San Francisco. “Her trial by fire came while she was at Penn, and she took that experience and has applied it very successfully at the Rockefeller Foundation.”

• • •

When Dr. Rodin came to the University of Pennsylvania, the neighborhoods surrounding Penn were unkempt, crime ridden, and forbidding. Walnut Street was marked by desolate parking lots and a dilapidated strip center. Penn bused students to the downtown Center City district to shop. The university buildings faced inward; loading docks were the main contact point with the city streets. Walking off campus was unpleasant during the day and considered dangerous after dark.

The situation was intolerable for Dr. Rodin, both as the university president and as a native of west Philadelphia who had grown up in the area when it still thrived. The deplorable state of the neighborhood was undercutting Penn’s ability to recruit world-caliber faculty and students; and, although the university was Philadelphia’s largest employer, its location was increasingly being viewed as an impediment to future growth and competitiveness.

In 1996, the circumstances became even grimmer when, over the course of a few weeks, one student was killed and others were mugged next to the campus boundary—a series of tragic events that forced Penn to take immediate action. Rather than retreat further from the community, Dr. Rodin chose a decidedly different course. “We could have built a higher wall, but the solution that started with Judy [Dr. Rodin] was that we needed to stop being apart from the neighborhood and start being part of it,” says Egbert Perry, a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania and chairman and chief executive officer of Atlanta-based Integral, a real estate development, advisory, and investment management company.

“Universities and medical centers are often the unwitting contributors to a neighborhood’s deterioration—they need more space, and as they push further into the neighborhoods, they drive people out. I really wanted to turn us [Penn] into an engine for good,” Dr. Rodin says. “We understood that we could not do this to the neighborhood, or even for the neighborhood, but that we had to do it with the neighborhood. The best design and the greatest architecture are insufficient without community engagement.”

What began as an urgent measure by Penn to create a safer environment for its students evolved into a full-scale neighborhood revitalization—a movement both gutsy and unproven. Known as the West Philadelphia Initiatives (WPI), the strategy was designed as an interlocking series of programs to address the area’s security, education, housing, and economic development needs, with the university taking the lead role as developer and facilitator. Incentives were created to encourage faculty and staff members to live near the university. With each phase of redevelopment, the university’s insularity was replaced with a solidarity of school and community.

“Judy would not only strategize, but would [also] get out, sit with community members, and refine what we were doing by listening to them and learning from them,” recalls John Fry, who served as an executive vice president in Dr. Rodin’s administration and is now president of Drexel University in Philadelphia. “The more we got into it, the more we realized that the job was much larger than we had initially anticipated. But through it all, she was undaunted; she was fearless.”

Ultimately, the university solved its security problem through urban design. “We said, ‘This isn’t about keeping kids out of the neighborhood. This is about how we light the streets and sidewalks, how we open the university buildings to the street.’ We wanted to signal that we were one community,” Dr. Rodin says.

• • •

A quote from Eleanor Roosevelt is engraved over the interior entrance to the Penn Bookstore at 36th Street and Walnut: “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” It sums up the philosophy that drove the revitalization, which started with moving the university’s bookstore out of the basement of a campus building and into a 55,000-square-foot space across the street. The store, located on what had been a parking lot for more than 30 years, opened in 1998 not just as a place to buy textbooks, but as a full-service bookstore with a café.

The Inn at Penn hotel, located next door, occupies the upper floors of the building; the bookstore/hotel project was the university’s first mixed-use venture as part of the WPI. In the ensuing years, Penn kept the momentum going on the west side of the campus with the development of the grocery store and the addition of more retail and dining space, a cinema, student housing, a 700-car parking garage, and a beautifully designed public elementary school. The university then shifted its focus to the campus’s east side, acquiring and converting an old industrial building into apartments, retail space, and office space, as well as building research, medical, and engineering facilities, plus playing fields and a public park.

Laurie Olin, partner at Olin, a landscape architecture, urban design, and planning firm with studios in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, and a professor of practice at Penn, had taught at the university for nearly 20 years before Dr. Rodin’s arrival. “Judy understood that what is good for Penn should be good for the community, and what is good for the community should be good for Penn,” Olin says. “She understood that the university needed a soft edge, it needed to be part of the community, not a thing next to it.”

“Judy was committed to creating an environment that encouraged students to be engaged citizens, and she realized that you cannot talk about civic engagement and then build facilities that disrupt or do not interact with the neighborhood,” explains Omar Blaik, co–chief executive officer at U3 Advisors, a real estate and economic development consulting practice in Philadelphia, and a senior executive in Penn’s facilities and real estate department during Dr. Rodin’s tenure. “We needed to add [land] uses that were not about us, but about the community.”

In addition to the hundreds of millions of dollars that Penn invested in commercial development, housing, and public space along the Walnut Street corridor, the university built the Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander University of Pennsylvania Partnership School (Alexander earned five degrees from Penn between 1918 and 1974, including the nation’s first PhD awarded to an African American and the first law degree awarded to a female student at Penn). Known as the Penn Alexander Elementary School, it is a neighborhood school operated by the Philadelphia School District in cooperation with Penn’s Graduate School of Education. The construction of the school provided an incentive for faculty, and Dr. Rodin insisted that it be a public school open to all neighborhood residents (about 75 percent of the school’s students have no Penn affiliations).

The addition of the school proved as pivotal in forging ties with the community as the commercial development projects, notes Blaik, who moved to the neighborhood and whose children attended Penn Alexander. “The school was a way for people with the university to relate to the neighborhood residents. When your kids all go to the same school, it creates a strong bond,” he says. “Your personal goals coincide with those of your neighbors. It creates an organic blurring of who is us and who is them.”

In 2003, the West Philadelphia Initiatives won an Award for Excellence from ULI; in 2004, Dr. Rodin was the first female to win the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce’s William Penn Award, which recognizes personal, professional, and community contributions to the Greater Philadelphia region. The movement has had staying power; despite changes in the university’s leadership, Penn is still building projects based on the revitalization plan.

Says university trustee Perry: “It was bold, because it was about investing in the neighborhood, not on the campus proper. That was new territory for the trustees. . . . [But] it has truly caused the transformation of the university and the life around it, which is great for recruiting students.” Applications have risen so much that only about 12 percent of Penn’s applicants are now accepted, compared with 50 percent in 1993, and the university’s endowment has increased nearly fivefold to its current level of about $7.7 billion. “I don’t think any one of us [Penn trustees] thinks this is something that has passed its time, because it continues to pays dividends every day,” Perry says.

Fry, the Drexel president, is applying the lessons learned at Penn by leading Drexel’s revival of neighborhoods around that university. “I am paying her [Dr. Rodin] the best tribute I could pay her, which is to extend the ethos, to carry on the work,” he says.

• • •

Etched in glass at the entrance to the Rockefeller Foundation’s headquarters in New York City is the phrase “Innovation for the Next 100 Years.” With an endowment of more than $4 billion, the foundation is one of the largest philanthropic organizations in the world. Established by John D. Rockefeller Sr. in 1913, its 102-year history reflects countless achievements that fulfill the mission set by its founder, which is to support the well-being of humanity around the globe. The foundation’s past work includes providing support for the development of a vaccine against yellow fever; for Jane Jacobs’s efforts to redefine urban planning and design; for the Green Revolution in farming, which increased crop production in developing countries; and for the Mother to Child Transmission Plus Initiative, which focuses on caring for HIV-positive women and their families and preventing the transmission of the virus from mother to child. The foundation has supported the work of more than 220 Nobel laureates, and two of its own officers have received Nobel prizes.

When Dr. Rodin assumed the foundation presidency in 2005, she applied two lessons learned from her community-building experience at Penn—the value of (1) leveraging and (2) partnerships as ways to maximize outcomes. Over the past eight years, the annual amount awarded by the foundation has risen to approximately $200 million in grants, which have leveraged more than $1 billion in additional funds from partners during that time. “The message I brought to Rockefeller is that it really isn’t sufficient to just give grants. To have a huge transformational impact, you really need to leverage your resources effectively,” she says. “Rockefeller is now viewed as an institution not only with an unbelievable storied 100-year history of enormous impact in many places, but an institution that is on the leading edge of innovation by thinking strategically about both leverage and partnerships.”

Applying the same pioneering approach she used at Penn, Dr. Rodin has overseen a structural shift at the foundation that has resulted in a portfolio of interconnected initiatives. Each initiative addresses multiple focus areas, all aimed at meeting four equally important goals: revalue ecosystems, advance health, secure livelihoods, and transform cities. Specifically, the initiatives are aimed at creating new job opportunities for youth in Africa and the United States; bringing clean electrification to rural villages in India; developing the fields of impact investing and innovative finance; advancing access to universal health coverage in developing countries; and building more-resilient communities and cities.

All of the focus areas are part of an overarching effort to reinforce the resilience of communities to environmental, economic, and social changes—enabling them to realize what the foundation refers to as the “resilience dividend.” The term, which is the title of a new book by Dr. Rodin, is one she often uses to describe the benefits of proactive investments in resilience building. “Resilience is about planning, it’s about investing in ways that are protective,” she explains. “As we see this work unfolding, we are beginning to understand that there is a dividend, even in the good times, for investing in resilience. It provides more economic opportunities and better social cohesion. It’s not just for the prevention of that horrible thing that may happen. . . . We believe strongly that building resilience can reduce the likelihood that every disruption becomes a disaster. And if you think about it that way, it really is a good metaphor for what we are trying to accomplish, and I think people are getting it.”

“Judy has built on the 20th-century innovations of the Rockefeller Foundation to create an entirely new paradigm for the 21st century,” says Ford Foundation president Darren Walker, who served as a vice president at the Rockefeller Foundation from 2005 to 2010. “She has created a new way of thinking about cities and the urban landscape through this notion of the resilience dividend. It takes into consideration the multiple outcomes that can be associated with a smart investment on the front end.

“That is the way Judy approaches things, in terms of how to get the biggest bang from an investment, how to solve a problem using limited resources. Judy is very smart about how to strategically deploy resources to get the greatest impact.”

• • •

In May 2013, the Rockefeller Foundation announced the “100 Resilient Cities Challenge,” a $100 million commitment to build resilience in cities around the world. The foundation defines resilience as “the capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, businesses, and systems within a city to survive, adapt, and grow no matter what kinds of chronic stresses and acute shocks they experience.” Through the program, grants are being awarded to 100 cities to support the hiring of a chief resilience officer, as well as to assist with the creation and implementation of a resilience strategy.

In December 2013, 32 cities ranging from Byblos, Lebanon, to New Orleans were selected from the first funding round as grant recipients; an additional 33 recipients from the second round will be announced within a few months. The two funding rounds collectively drew more than 700 applications, which Dr. Rodin proudly points to as an indicator that cities worldwide are “thinking about resilience is a very deliberative way.” Local officials in cities that have already received grants are citing the positive impact of having a chief resilience officer who is integrated across all elements of municipal government, she notes.

In a testimonial posted on the foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities website (www.100resilientcities.org), New Orleans Mayor Mitchell J. Landrieu says, “The Rockefeller Foundation’s partnership is invaluable to mayors across the world because it is critical to our ability to identify and create innovative solutions on the ground. Through this collaboration, I am confident that New Orleans will become the global model for resilience by our city’s 300th anniversary in 2018, building resiliency across all sectors and identifying the best approaches to our city’s inherited natural challenges.”

“Judy’s focus on urban transformation, on cities as a place of opportunity, and on increasing equity for citizens and others emigrating to cities is really fundamental to where the Rockefeller Foundation is going with its programs,” says Nichols Prize jury member Marilyn J. Taylor, dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design. “Being named one of the [100 Resilient] cities means receiving a commitment from the foundation to work with the stakeholders in each city to assemble the resources, leverage assets, and get to implementation. Judy truly gets things done.”

The foundation is the lead supporter of Rebuild by Design, a program created by the federal government in response to Hurricane Sandy’s 2012 devastation of communities in the U.S. Northeast. Rebuild by Design is dedicated to creating innovative community- and policy-based solutions to protect the nation’s cities that are most vulnerable to increasingly intense weather events and other environmental uncertainties. While the program to date has focused on areas affected by Sandy, it is being expanded to communities across the United States.

Initiated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Presidential Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force, Rebuild by Design involves a design competition through which winning teams of researchers and designers work with local businesses, policy makers, and other stakeholders on redeveloping their communities to be environmentally and economically sound. In the program’s first phase, ten interdisciplinary teams were selected in 2013 to participate in a yearlong process and competition; the teams include architects, landscape architects, regional and transportation planners, engineers, and community organizers.

On June 2, 2014, then–HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan announced the winning proposals, which offered redevelopment schemes for Staten Island, the Bronx, Long Island, and Manhattan in New York and Hoboken and the Meadowlands in New Jersey.

Although the specifics of each plan were tailored for the designated areas, Dr. Rodin points out that land use planning was the design element at the core of all the proposals. “Land use is a fundamental pillar of building a resilient city,” she says. “If we get land use planning wrong, we cannot get transportation planning right or energy [conservation] right. . . . A resilient city relies on how the land is thought about and designed.”

The foundation is expanding its focus on resilience with a new program aimed at helping the most vulnerable areas of the world recoup more of the funds spent on disaster recovery and leverage more funds for development. Together with the United States Agency for International Development and other partners, the foundation is supporting initiatives in the Sahel and Horn regions of Africa and the region between South and Southeast Asia to enable humanitarian relief agencies to invest more in building capacity before emergencies. “We are picking the hardest spots to push this idea forward,” Dr. Rodin says. “Resilience applies to how you organize leadership and governance and to the kind of social fabric and social cohesion that exists, as well as physical infrastructure, land use planning, and design. All of that together is what really creates this resilient capacity that we have been emphasizing.

“Resilience is often referred to as an inborn quality, but we are learning that resilience is a learnable characteristic for people, institutions, and cities. If we keep at this—we at Rockefeller and the global community in general—we can acquire the skills to build resilience into our land use planning, our architecture and design, our school-based curricula—all the many ways that enable it to be taught and learned. That gives me great hope.”

Visionaries in Urban Development (ISBN 978-0-87420-348-6) is available through ULI’s online bookstore for $59.95. ULI members receive a 25% discount on all ULI Publications. For details, visit uli.org/join, e-mail [email protected], or call 800-321-5011.

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