The Renewal Project

The Renewal Project is a national coalition seeking to remember and redress the historical harms of university-driven displacement and dispossession from urban renewal. This coalition brings together teams of university faculty, staff, students, and community leaders across the country to support local campaigns for redress and material reparations. Through teaching, research, and public memory activities, we leverage the power of collective action to develop strategies for repair, including community reinvestment, police reform, and financial compensation.

The Renewal Project situates local stories within the national context of urban renewal; provides space for local teams to learn from each other; and builds solidarity among participants. This work activates projects of historical recovery, reckoning and repair, and helps build just futures for communities displaced and dispossessed by university expansion, envisioning new equitable collaborations between universities and their communities that understand, and undo, historical harms. In the process of working across campus and host community, diverse stakeholder interests and uneven histories, the Renewal Project provides the model for a new vision of the university more broadly.

The Renewal Project is coordinated through a collaboration between the University of Minnesota, the Smart Cities Research Lab at Trinity College, and the Humanities Action Lab.