Looking around the U.S. for examples of innovation campuses to learn from, The Aggie Square team has returned again and again to Philadelphia. There, two research universities — Drexel University and University of Pennsylvania — have joined the venerable, research-focused, nonprofit University City Science Center. Not only that, the partnership extends to a canny business district — University City District — providing us both a model and a warning.

University City District is situated two miles from Philadelphia’s City Hall. In Sacramento, the California state house and downtown are three miles from Aggie Square. Like Aggie Square, bioscience research looms large in the University City Science Center, and both innovation districts have major hospitals nearby. Finally, and again like Aggie Square, the Philadelphia innovation district abuts neighborhoods that have been underserved by their city. 

Nowadays, investing in those neighborhoods is a crucial part of the operations for Drexel and for University City Science Center. But it was not always so. 

Each of the major Philadelphia contributors to their innovation district brings something different. Drexel and Penn bring faculty researchers, community engagement programs (like Drexel’s Dornsife Center for Neighborhood Partnerships), and community investments (like Drexel’s collaboration on a new K-8 public school). The Science Center brings support for commercializing research, middle and high school STEAM programming and convening space. 

As you can tell from that division of labor, the universities involved in Philadelphia have strong and committed institutional partners. Here’s a model for us: In Aggie Square, we have an opportunity to show what it looks like to bring the contemporary land grant university to the urban setting. To do so we’ll need to partner, partner, partner. 

And we have! Aggie Square is a stronger project because of the partnership between UC Davis, the city of Sacramento, and Wexford Science & Technology, the project’s developer. Aggie Square is also, vitally, a partnership that brings together the two campuses of UC Davis like never before. If we are going to build an innovation ecosystem worthy of the region, we will do so on the foundation of those existing partnerships as well as institutional partnerships to come that we can’t even fully imagine yet.

We are at the beginning of this process. The partners in Philadelphia have been at it for half a century. This gives them advantages but also a lot of baggage. 

The nonprofit University City Science Center was formed in 1963 and proclaims itself the “oldest and largest urban research park in the country.” Its accomplishments in innovation and the commercialization of research are legion. 

Yet the Science Center is also built on city blocks that were bulldozed as part of 1950s and 60s urban renewal, which changed the face of so many cities in the United States. In Philadelphia, the local redevelopment agency cleared a mixed residential and commercial, historically African-American neighborhood along Market Street in a part of the city where Penn and Drexel now intertwine. That’s where the Science Center began. 

The downstream impact of neighborhood razing  is a complete transformation, but it didn’t happen right away. It was in the mid-1990s that Penn, understanding the personal and economic impacts caused by development, reimagined its relationship to the surrounding neighborhoods by beginning to invest in them. Drexel has since picked up the anchor institution baton, and in 2018 launched a massive “20-year, $3.5 billion project” that in the words of university president John Fry “will benefit thousands of low-income families without disrupting the fabric of their neighborhoods.” 

Development can cut both ways, of course. Two decades of anchor institution work by the universities and their partners has led to the vibrancy of small businesses and large research facilities as well as rising housing prices. To invest in a neighborhood is to change it.  

At Aggie Square, we’re building in a different era than the mid-20th-century moment in which the University Science Center was born. No city redevelopment agency is razing anything. To the contrary, we’re collaborating with the city to invest in the neighborhoods adjacent to our campus. 

With concerted efforts by UC Davis, the city of Sacramento and also our developer partner Wexford, inclusive economic development has become our guiding principle. Our Community Benefits Partnership Agreement has made affordable housing among the techniques available to mitigate gentrification. Even with our partnership and our goals firmly in place, the histories of urban-located and urban-serving institutions like Drexel and Penn have much to teach us about evolving our role in the community.  

One example is the approach to workforce development called the West Philadelphia Skills Initiative. Developed by the University City District, it draws board membership from Penn and Drexel as well as neighborhood, community and business.  

West Philly Skills collaborates with employers to train people for open jobs. (This is the opposite of what is sometimes derisively referred to as “train and pray,” in which potential job seekers are trained for areas that might be emerging but for which there is no certain employer.) The University City District team identifies a job like Certified Nursing Assistant or IT Help Desk Associate that a local employer needs to hire and then provides the foundational skills — sometimes called “soft skills” — as well as the technical skills that allow un- or underemployed residents of the neighborhoods around Drexel and Penn to get those jobs and succeed in them. 

We have more to learn about how our university might try on this approach in Sacramento, and obviously it would be just one piece of how Aggie Square could impact its neighborhoods. But it could be an important piece as we work to fulfill the promise of bringing the land grant mission to an urban environment. We have the opportunity to create that new model of the public research university by learning from those who have gone before. If the Philadelphia example of an innovation campus offers an origin story, a model, and a warning, Aggie Square leans towards the future. It is the innovation campus version 2.0.