Project: The Renewal Project

The Renewal Project is a coalition of universities, faculty, students, and community partners dedicated to exploring and addressing university-driven urban renewal projects beginning in the 1950s and 1960s that displaced poor people, primarily people of color, from their neighborhoods. Urban renewal’s harms took place through a range of methods, from neighborhood demolition and displacement to campus police expansion. Working across universities, the coalition brings to light local stories of campus expansion and its attendant costs in the past and the present. Teams combine public memory and humanities pedagogies and processes–including curricula, maps, traveling exhibitions, healing circles, and performances–with proposals and campaigns for material reparations and transformation, such as reinvestment, police reform, and financial compensation. The Renewal Project is co-facilitated by The Humanities Action Lab, Minnesota Transform, and the Smart Cities Lab.