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Show What Factors Promote, Impede Adjustment to Urban Living? Editor's Note: This is the last in a series of articles dealing with plans to set up a "4-H" type program for urban areas. The study is being financed by the Ford Foundation. The University of Delaware is studying the assimilation of recent migrants to Wilmington, to determine the factors that promote or impede adjustment to city living. Many urban-extension activities activi-ties on the soqial aspects of urbanization are reminiscent of agricultural extension. As the home-demonstration agent helped farmers' families raise their living standards, urban ur-ban agents are working with urban families particularly the low-income racial minorities flooding into deteriorating city neighborhoods that have been largely abandoned by middle-class middle-class white residents. In a . steel-making community in the Calumet, Indiana, region, Purdue University has set up a staff of family-service agents that provides technical assistance on housing, budgeting, and home-making home-making services. The University's Univer-sity's program in one low-income apartment project includes establishment of a play program for pre-school children, a sewing class for mothers, and in-service training for parents. In Pittsburgh, four universities are cooperating with ACTION-Housing, ACTION-Housing, Inc. in a program centering cen-tering on the revitalization of older neighborhoods. Prior to the grants, a "self-help renewal" project was conducted in a built-up, built-up, predominantly Negro, neighborhood neigh-borhood of low- and middle-income middle-income families. University researchers re-searchers conducted field surveys sur-veys in cooperation with local residents. Leadership training courses and teen-age block clubs were established. Volunteer teachers were trained to assist in homemaking instruction. A program for yard and garden care was set up. With the grant, this program will be extended to other neighborhoods in Pittsburgh Pitts-burgh and Allegheny County. In general, the urban-extension programs reflect the close interrelations between the physical, phys-ical, governmental and social aspects of urban problems. Rutgers' new Urban Studies Center is conducting surveys on all aspects of community life in Bayonne, Newark, New Brunswick, Bruns-wick, and Trenton. The University of Wisconsin's urban-extension center in the Fox Valley, a region marked by rapid industrialization and complex com-plex governmental jurisdictions, is working with neighborhood associations and with individual families on their economic problems. prob-lems. In Milwaukee the University's Univer-sity's urban agents are encouraging encourag-ing research by existing agencies health, highway, public welfare wel-fare departments, a committee on the aging population, the state association of county boards, and others. The University is also setting set-ting up such agencies as a bureau of economic research and a bureau bu-reau of social research to handle unmet local research needs. The educational aspects of the programs center on graduate-level graduate-level training of urban specialists special-ists and generalists. Rutgers, in addition, has established a series of fellowships to permit able persons per-sons from the community journalists, jour-nalists, younger executives, and civic leaders to spend a year at the University studying urban affairs and participating in its extension activties. The Ford Foundation has announced an-nounced the establishment of a committee to review its urban-extension urban-extension projects in the next two years. It is headed by James S. Pope, former executive editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal and the Louisville Times. The other members are former Mayor William Hartsfield of Atlanta, Mayor Arthur Naftalin of Minneapolis, Min-neapolis, and former Mayor Frank Zeidler of Milwaukee. The committee will also report to interested national, state, and local governmental and non-governmental groups on the progress of the experiments. "Urban problems require more than sporadic and piecemeal solutions," solu-tions," says Henry T. Heald, president pres-ident of the Foundation. "They need the sustained attention of the total community and, in particular, par-ticular, the trained talent and methods of research and scholarship scholar-ship that are both the province and the manifest respsonsibility of the university to provide. Both by tradition and necessity, American Amer-ican society is looking to its universities uni-versities to provide the knowledge, knowl-edge, experimentation and guidance guid-ance needed to understand a host of problems." Isn't it amazing what snow-flakes snow-flakes can do when they stick together? |
