This essay argues that the study of urban poverty is too often characterised by the disappearance of specific people and bodily politics from our analytic frames, rendering modes of life and politics illegible to scholars. We call for attention to the embodied politics of knowledge production, as neighbourhoods surrounding universities are exploited first as laboratories for poverty scholarship-exemplified in the relationship between the Chicago School's theory of human ecology and the racialised real estate markets-and then as devalued spaces for creative industries. Following work at the intersection of urban studies and American studies, we call for a relational reading of the archives of dominant poverty scholarship, and for scholarship attentive to the body -as a knowledge project only ever partially recorded in fieldnotes or the archives-as a key site for politics.

Using the University of Chicago as a case study, this essay examines the racial foundations of sociological thought during the discipline's rising academic legitimacy and cultural authority, in the rst half of the 20 th century. Much more than critical hindsight, the basic theories and methods developed by the "Chicago School" and Robert Park in particular did not just construct racial categories, but were constructed by national anxieties about racial differences in urbanizing America. From this anxiety emerged a "second wave" of Black social scientists who both offered important and under recognized critiques of the "Chicago School" outlook, while reinforcing its industrial framework of organization and civilization in ways that marked "Black" identity as maladjustment, deviance and dysfunction. By stripping away this overarching sociological framework and resituating the "data" derived from "Black subjects" within its migrant and urban context, this essay ends with thoughts about how Chicago's Black residents theorized themselves, their neighborhoods and the larger world in ways that challenged both White and Black sociological visions.

Today colleges and universities are the dominant employers, real estate holders, policing agents, and educational and health care providers in major cities where they once played a less prominent role. Neighborhoods of color surrounding urban campuses are left most vulnerable to the for-profit developments of higher education, because the land is cheap and the citizens hold little political influence. This essay examines the long-standing relationship between the University of Chicago (U of C) and black communities surrounding the campus to chronicle the rise of what I call “UniverCities.” The U of C’s historic control of urban development on the South Side helps explain why higher education must be placed alongside the state and the financial sector as a key institutional catalyst shaping the growth and development of the twenty-first-century city.

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