Dear Friends and Colleagues,

May is commencement month at UIC. We are very pleased to recognize and congratulate the following individuals who have worked as graduate research assistants at GCI and graduated from a range of colleges at UIC:

Natasha Clark, School of Pubic Health
Shilpa Deshpande, College of Applied Health Sciences
Pam Durongpisitkul, College of Business Administration
Shakeel Khawaja, College of Engineering
Marisol Miramontes, College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs
John O'Neal, College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs
Lynn Peemoeller, College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs
Kingsley Weaver, School of Public Health

David Perry Professor and Director	Lauri Alpern Associate Director

News

Long-term Partnership Creates The ABLA Initiative for Men
Developed from a long history of involvement and partnership between the UIC Neighborhoods Initiative and West Side Future a comprehensive local social service organization, the ABLA Initiative for Men (AIM) is a new program designed to reduce health disparities and improve the quality of life of African American men in the ABLA, Newberry Park, and Barbara Jean Wright neighborhoods. Support from the Chicago Community Trust has been received by West Side Future in partnership with UICNI to support this effort.

Cynthia Barnes-Boyd, Director, UICNI, cboyd@uic.edu or Angela Ellison, Executive Director, West Side Future, angela_ellison@ymcachgo.org.

Calendar

Great Lakes Cities Symposium on October 2-4, 2003. The symposium, organized by Cleveland State University's Center for Economic Development, will be held in collaboration with the Great Lakes Economic Development (GLED) Annual Conference. The focus of the symposium will be the regeneration of Great Lakes cities and their waterfronts. There is a call for case studies of waterfront planning and economic development efforts in Great Lakes Cities to highlight at the symposium. Teams of practitioners and academics will be invited to present selected case studies. For more information, please visit: http://urban.csuohio.edu/forum/.

Tenth Anniversary Great Cities Winter Forum on Friday, December 5, 2003. Details in the June GCI Monthly - don't forget to save the date!

People

GCI Fellow, Louise Cainkar has been named as one of 13 nationwide Carnegie Scholars this year by the New York-based Carnegie Corporation. For her project, Cainkar plans to conduct research into the heightened degrees of religious expression among Arabs in Chicago and the implications of that expression for American democracy. Previously, Cainkar received a Russell Sage Foundation grant in 2002 to study how the events of 9/11 affected immigrant and native-born Muslim Arabs in Chicago, which ranks among the top five American cities in Arab population.

In April, GCI Fellow Marty Jaffe was busy presenting a number of papers. He presented an overview of planning and zoning for the 7th Annual Meeting of the Illinois Association of Municipal Managers Assistants, entitled "Community Development 101: What Planners Think Managers Really Need to Know." He also gave a paper on managing the Chicago region's water supply resources at the Annual Meeting of the Illinois Groundwater Association and provided an overview of the Great Lakes Charter Annex (Annex 2001) before NIPC's tri-state Southern Lake Michigan Basin Water Supply Planning and Management Task Force.

Dennis Judd, GCI Faculty Scholar and professor of Political Science, has just edited a new book, The Infrastructure of Play (M.E. Sharpe) and David Perry, GCI Director, has contributed the lead chapter to the book, "Urban Tourism and the Privatizing Discourses of Public Infrastructure."

GCI Fellow and Dean of the College of Business Administration, Wim Wiewel, , and GCI Director, David Perry joined Roz Greenstein, of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, in co-chairing the spring meeting of Universities as Developers, a GCI project now in its third year of funding by the Lincoln Institute. Perry and Wiewel, along with GCI researcher Lynn Stevens, worked with forty university leaders from around the country in the meeting, which was held at the Lincoln Institute in Cambridge, MA, on the topic "Big Science, Big Development and the City."

Lauri Alpern, GCI Associate Director served as a reviewer for the federal Corporation for National Service's Learn and Serve America Community-based grants.

Faculty Scholar Spotlight
Each month we are pleased to introduce you to three GCI faculty scholars who have spent the 2002-2003 year with us.

Steve Jones received his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Communications. He is currently a Professor and the head of the Department of Communications at UIC. His GCI project, based on previous work for the Pew Internet and American Life Project, is entitled "A Great City Online: A Study of the Internet's Impact on Chicago's Neighborhoods." The goal of the research is to better understand the conditions "on the ground" that have an impact on both the ability of Internet technology to connect citizens to their local communities, and on the ability of CTCs to enhance community development.

Bryant T. Marks received his PhD from the University of Michigan in Social Psychology and is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and African American Studies at UIC. The title of his GCI research project is "On Being Separate and Together: Hyper-Segregation, Diversity, and Inter Racial Relations in Urban Settings." His research focuses on stereotyping and prejudice in schools and the workplace; racial identity; culture; self-esteem; inter-group relations and issues of diversity. He is a consulting editor for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and on the editorial board of the Journal of Black Psychology.

Sarah Ullman is a social psychologist interested in treatment and prevention of sexual assault in the community. She received her PhD in Social Psychology at Brandeis University and is an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at UIC. Her research project, "Policies and Practices of Mental Health Service Providers to Chicago Sexual Assault Victims: Reducing Barriers to Effective Treatment" is expected to contribute to GCI's ongoing focus on public policy responses to violence against women and to bring together researchers and community service providers with this focus.