David C. Perry PhD., Professor and GCI Director
David Perry joined the Urban Planning and Policy faculty in January 1999 as Professor and Director of the Great Cities Institute. The Institute is a university-wide center of engaged research that brings students and faculty together in partnerships designed to produce the very best new interdisciplinary understanding of the great cities of the world, starting with Chicago. For David this represents something of a "dream" situation for advanced urban scholarship and action. The politics, economics, social conditions, ethno-racial relations and aesthetics of Chicago make it one of the most important cities of urban study and having the chance to work in a curriculum and engaged research environment that pushes the disciplinary limits of such study both locally and globally is a wonderful and rare educational opportunity.
The author of eight books and over 150 articles, book chapters and reports on urban political economy, social policy, spatial theory and urban planning, public infrastructure, public administration and regional change, Perry has studied cities from various disciplinary vantage points, having served on the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Government, on the faculty of the School of Planning and Architecture at the University at Buffalo and having been appointed to various research posts, including a two year visiting endowed professorship as the Albert A. Levin Chair of Urban Studies at the Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University. While at the University at Buffalo, Perry founded the Center for Regional Studies and later on went on to help co-found the Institute for Local Governance and Regional Growth.
David's research has also made its way into well over 100 local, national and regional policy initiatives and he has published in such non-academic places as New York Times, The Nation, and Metropolis magazine. With geographer Sallie Marston of the University of Arizona, he was the Series Co-editor of the Urban Affairs Annual Reviews book series.
Courses
Honors College Seminar: Great Cities
Building the Public City: Planning and Infrastructure
Contested Cities
Research
* Urban political economy and theory of state
* Spatial theory and urban planning
* Urban finance, public infrastructure and governance
* Regionalism and structures of governance
Publications
Selected Articles and Chapters
"Urban Tourism and the Privatizing Discourses of Public Infrastructure" in Dennis Judd (ed) The Infrastructure of Play (M.E.Sharpe, 2003)
"The Conflictive Practices of the University as an Urban Institution," in David Perry and Wim Wiewel (ed) The University, Land and the City (Lincoln Institute, forthecoming, 2004)
"Making Space: Planning as a Mode of Thought," in Susan Fainstein and Scott Campbell (eds) Readings in Planning Theory (Blackwell, 2003)
“Infrastructure Investment,” in The International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences (E.S. Pulsevier: forthcoming, 2005)
"Planning and the City: The Turbulent Practice," in Planning Theory, 10-11, Winter. (1994)
Selected Books
Among David's early books are Police in the Metropolis and Violence as Politics. In 1978 he and Alfred Watkins edited and co-wrote the book: Rise of the Sunbelt Cities.He co-authored the book Managing Local Government and two more recent books: Building the Public City: The Politics, Finance and Governance of Public Infrastructure and Spatial Practices, a collection of essays on urban theory, edited and co-authored with Helen Liggett. He is also the co-editor of Cleveland: A Metropolitan Reader. He is also finishing a new book with Wim Wiewel, The University, the City and Land, as part of a project on urban universities and land development, sponsored by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Contact
dperry@uic.edu
Room 429
312-996-8700