Urban Research and Development Initiative (URDI)
The principal aim of the Urban Research and Development Initiative (URDI) is to catalogue, analyze, and address unique challenges facing African Americans in contemporary urban settings. As the brainchild of Dr. Lynn Todman, a former AFAM advisory committee member, and Dr. Hugh R. Page, Jr., a former director of the African American Studies Program, URDI was developed to chart, assess, and find ways to deal with problems encountered by African and Afrodiasporan peoples living in urban centers worldwide. The city, as locus of social life and political activity, has long occupied the Western imagination. During the early part of this century, industrialization and the promise of jobs made them places of promise and hope. In the late 1960s, urban unrest and the expansion of suburbs adjacent to major metropolitan areas diminished their popular stock. As we enter the third millennium, opinion appears divided.
For Americans in general, cities have been variously construed. Many cities—large and small—have undergone a Renaissance while others continue to languish. Thus, for some, cities are symbols of technological triumph, while for others they are the embodiment of all that has taken humanity from its natural state of grace-filled being. For African Americans, especially, urban engagement has been problematic. A number of social, economic, and political pressures fueled early migrations to major coastal and Midwestern cities. However, the continuing legacy of segregation and ongoing economic disenfranchisement make cities loci of both promise and frustration. In sum, they remain magnets whose poles attract some and repulse others.
Riots in recent years in nearby Benton Harbor, Michigan (2005) and in Toledo, Ohio (2005) made national news and drove home the point that severe economic disparity should be addressed, especially when coupled with racial disparity and uneasy race relations between police forces and the African American residents and between city planners, African American populations and white supremacists, respectively. URDI, in 2003, took pre-emptive actions to convene members of the South Bend and University communities through a series of focus group discussions. Intended to survey and catalogue ethnic, racial, economic, and cultural pressure points, focus group discussions revealed the absence of detailed analysis of the city’s African American population. Therefore serving as an important medium for promoting interdisciplinary exchange, URDI provided needed service to the African American community.
This research initiative seeks to address factors such as:
- increased global economic integration that has elevated cities in the determination of national economic and social welfare
- the creation and implementation of new and innovative approaches to address poverty and its attendant problems
- higher education and its role in addressing social, economic, environmental, physical and other problems that plague the nation's and international urban areas
- complexity and dynamism of urban systems to initiate and identify transdisciplinary approaches and resolution for urban problems
- the limited collection of data as raw materials from which proposals are developed to address specific social, political, economic, religious, and other concerns