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Abstract

On February 4th, 1957, the UC Bus, a privately operated transit system available only to faculty and students at the University of Chicago, began operations. A year and a half later, the Hyde Park-Kenwood Urban Renewal Plan was approved by the City of Chicago, seizing and clearing 106 acres of land and displacing 4,000 families on the city's South Side, in the name of maintaining a "compatible environment" for the university's continued operations. This paper assembles the history of, explores the motives and constituencies behind, and establishes the University of Chicago's campus shuttle system's spatial impact. It places the university's private transportation system within its post-war campaign of urban renewal––a decades-long effort to control the character of the space around its campus––echoing papers that have similarly implicated the university's privately operated police force, charter schools, and assisted housing program for employees.

By combining traditional archival research with computational text mining techniques, this paper finds that while initially conceived as a simple connection to commuter transit and parking lots, the UC Bus was reappropriated as a tool of urban renewal within a year of its inception. The faculty and the student body lobbied the administration to expand its spatial and temporal scale dramatically. This served to establish a selective permeability of space in the neighborhoods adjoining the university, allowing their land to be used by members of the University community without granting undesirable incumbent residents access to the university in turn.

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