Time and Place

The Innovative Cities Lecture Series
Time: 12:00-1:00 pm
Location: Architecture and Urban Planning Building 345

“Building the High-Road in Wisconsin: The UniverCity Alliance & UniverCity Year program”” presentation by Joel Rogers and Gavin Luter

Lecture Summary

High-road policy and governance promotes shared prosperity, environmental sustainability, and efficient democratic government. Building high-road cities, metropolitan regions, and states is both good for citizens and a key way to move the national dialogue toward progressive policy solutions. Learn about a new effort at UW-Madison aimed at coordinating teaching, research, and service in service of building high-road places in Wisconsin. Building these kinds of cities is complex, and local governments need partners who can guide them through these complexities. This is the aim of the UniverCity Year program, a three-year partnership between local governments at UW-Madison where students and faculty work on projects identified by localities. Coordination with complementary UW-Milwaukee programs will also be discussed.

BIO

Joel Rogers
Joel Rogers is the Sewell-Bascom Professor of Law, Political Science, Public Affairs, and Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also directs COWS, a national research and practice center on high-road development which also operates the Mayors Innovation Project, State Smart Transportation Initiative (with Smart Growth America), and ProGov21. Rogers has written widely on party politics, democratic theory, and cities and urban regions. Along with many scholarly and popular articles, his books include The Hidden Election, On Democracy, Right Turn, Metro Futures, Associations and Democracy, Works Councils, Working Capital, What Workers Want, Cites at Work, and American Society: How It Really Works. Joel is an active citizen as well as academic. He has worked with and advised many politicians and social movement leaders, and has initiated and/or helped lead several progressive NGOs (including the New Party [now the Working Families Party], EARN, WRTP, Apollo Alliance [now part of the Blue Green Alliance], Emerald Cities Collaborative, State Innovation Exchange, and EPIC-N [Educational Partnership for Innovation in Communities Network). He is a contributing editor of The Nation and Boston Review, a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, and identified by Newsweek as one of the 100 living Americans most likely to shape U.S. politics and culture in the 21st century.

Gavin Luter
Gavin Luter received his Ph.D. in educational administration from the University of Buffalo in 2015. He holds a Master’s of Science degree in the higher education administration from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and a Bachelor’s of Arts degree from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in public and non-profit management. Most recently, Luter served as the Executive Director of Wisconsin Campus Compact. While pursuing his doctorate, he published several peer-reviewed articles and served as guest editor of a peer-reviewed academic journal on community-school-university partnerships and the intersection of school reform and neighborhood development. As part of his project work with the University at Buffalo Center for Urban Studies, Luter served as education planning director of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Choice Neighborhood initiative where he worked to secure over $16 million in commitments from 45 different philanthropic and higher education partners to create a neighborhood-linked education system. Luter also oversaw the Center’s neighborhood development internship program where college students operated an in-school project-based learning enrichment program for middle school students centered on neighborhood-based problem solving. At the United Way of Greater Knoxville, Luter managed a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation regional teacher effectiveness advocacy and coalition-building grant project. At the University of Tennessee-Knoxville’s (UTK) Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy, Luter developed and coordinated an undergraduate student living-learning community experience for students interested in public service and civic engagement.

Please RSVP to lewis298@uwm.edu if you plan on attending!
Pizza will be served, but you will need to provide your own beverage.
AICP-CM credits will be awarded.

Need Parking?

Please checkout Visiting the UW-Milwaukee Campus for transit and non–motorized options and parking.

Need Directions?

Get directions to The School of Architecture and Urban Planning building at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is located at 2131 East Hartford Avenue, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Questions, comments?

All lectures are free and open to planners, students, staff, faculty, and friends of the University.
Please contact Michael Lewis , Department of Urban Planning Project Assistant at lewis298@uwm.edu