In Building the Ivory Tower, LaDale Winling offers a deeply researched and highly readable account of how universities influenced the spatial development of American cities in the twentieth century. The book, which is structured as five case studies of university-city relationships, also provides a rich set of photographs and maps. The high point is chapter 3, on the University of Chicago (U of C) and its real estate initiatives around the Hyde Park campus after World War II. While some scholars have known that the U of C pioneered a mode of relating to its physical surroundings in the 1950s that other universities followed, Winling provides a richer picture of this activity. He shows, for instance, that university officials did not just benefit from federal Section 112 urban renewal credits, but actually originated the legislation (part of the Housing Act of 1959). Julian Levi, who directed U of C's efforts to reshape its neighborhood, “coordinated the congressional lobbying effort and hired former Housing and Home Finance Agency general counsel B. T. Fitzpatrick to write the final text” (p. 106). In this situation, Levi acted not just for the U of C but for a coalition of urban institutions coordinated through the Association of American Universities. He then “began to speak [and consult] around the country” to advise institutions on gaining urban renewal funds, which “helped solidify the [U of C's] actions as a model” (p. 107).

Winling describes how the Section 112 program gave universities leverage over their city governments. Any university investment in “an approved urban renewal plan area” (p. 107) could count as a

U of C used this program to gain city approval for the university's takeover of a long strip of land between 60th and 61st Streets south of the Midway, which university leaders considered essential for protecting the campus from problems in the neighborhood farther south. One of the institutions Levi coached was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which used Section 112 in the mid-1970s to overcome local resistance in Cambridge to its plan for remaking Kendall Square, a deindustrialized area adjacent to campus. Contrary to the hopes of working-class residents to bring new industrial plants to the tract, MIT and the Cambridge Redevelopment Authority populated it with biotech and computer firms in the 1980s. This move ultimately reshaped the demographics of Cambridge. A 1994 state measure invalidating long-standing rent control policies in Boston and Cambridge, which Winling portrays as a marker of neoliberalism, exacerbated this shift. Winling argues that Harvard and MIT, with their “white-collar vision” (p. 154), “were altering the spatial logic of metropolitan Boston” (p. 155).

It was a different story at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB). There, local resistance led to a city council vote in 1966 denying the university's proposal to use Section 112 funds to redevelop land south of campus. The university then decided to go it alone, but after demolition work on the designated plot, the legislature did not provide construction funds. Local activists tried to turn this land into People's Park, which led to one of the most notorious and violent campus-related street battles of the 1960s. Winling finds a trajectory from the Free Speech Movement, which started in 1964 over a contested strip of land, to the 1969 People's Park protest to Berkeley's Neighborhood Protection Ordinance of 1973, with its “moratorium on new development and demolition” (p. 149). He argues that this trajectory shows that “the politics of space was key to the disintegration of the liberal political order” (p. 140). In Berkeley, “politically liberal ideals required conservative urban design ideals” (p. 149) rather than the functional modernist aesthetic typical of postwar liberalism.

Racial issues are a major theme in the first three chapters, which suggest a trend of university policies encouraging white residents to live near campuses while keeping black residents at bay. Again, chapter 3 offers the richest treatment. Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders appears as a U of C student and member of the Congress on Racial Equality, helping to lead what Winling says is the first protest accusing a university of racial discrimination (January 1962). Students occupied the administration building for nearly two weeks. They charged that the University Realty Management Office, which managed the many off-campus housing units the U of C had purchased as part of its neighborhood initiative, displayed “a pattern of racial discrimination” (p. 110). Winling has dug up evidence that supports the protesters’ charge. He shows that U of C official Don Blakiston would watch property listings in the city's top newspaper, the Chicago Tribune. If an owner switched the ad to the Chicago Defender, the main African American newspaper, the university would move to purchase the property. In addition, “The university paid landlords rent to hold apartments empty in the summer so that African Americans could not lease them in months when student demand declined and vacancies opened up” (p. 104). He also presents evidence that U of C administrators were not necessarily motivated by racism. Sometimes they were more concerned about class. In an early memo, Levi wrote of eliminating “slum and blight which will attract lower class Whites and Negroes” (p. 91). The Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference, a cooperating organization, pursued an “interracial community” of “high standards,” which Winling interprets as “a class-based standard that effectively excluded all but a few African Americans” (p. 98). The Chicago chapter is stellar, but in chapter 2 on the University of Texas (UT), Winling sometimes overreaches in his evaluation. Among several such examples, the most notable is his claim that “each new building at UT advanced the cause of segregation in higher education and in Austin” (p. 62).

This good book is marred by a few errors. Chapter 4 kicks off with a reference to “UCB president Clark Kerr” (p. 119) when no such position existed, although Winling later explains the distinction between chancellor at Berkeley and UC president (Kerr moved from the former to the latter office in 1958). Elsewhere, Winling states, “At the end of the nineteenth century, women's attendance at American institutions of higher education was rare, radical, and highly constrained” (p. 60). To support this point, he cites Linda Gordon, Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era, 1890–1920 (1990), but that book's author is actually Lynn Gordon, who showed that women's attendance was not rare in that era. Despite these flaws, Building the Ivory Tower makes a valuable contribution to twentieth-century US history, especially by spotlighting the role universities played in shaping urban space.