Production of Knowledge, Consumption of Space: Exploring Gentrification and Philadelphia's Collegiate Institutions
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2014
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Bryn Mawr College. Department of Growth and Structure of Cities
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Bi-College users only
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Abstract
With over 80 colleges and universities within the greater Philadelphia area, academic institutions are a dominant feature of the urban landscape. This thesis considers the relationship between metropolitan academic institutions and their surrounding neighborhoods. Focusing on narratives of gentrification, this thesis asks how the presence of colleges and universities serves as an agent of social and spatial change in Philadelphia. Analysis of campus expansion as a gentrification of space and the institution's role in promoting Philadelphia's growing young adult population, suggests that university-driven gentrification fosters spatial identities that have consciously aligned Philadelphia with Richard Florida's model of the Creative City, but in doing so have excluded the preexisting urban context and furthered spatial segregation. This thesis does not offer a moral evaluation of gentrification, but rather aims to illuminate the university's role in the changing spatial identity of Philadelphia and the consequences that may follow.