Funding: Fulbright Program, Council for International Exchange of Scholars
Summary: This project was given a Fulbright Alumni Award in April of 2003. It followed Clarence Stone’s year as a Visiting Fulbright Professor at the University of Southern Denmark from 2001-2002. As indicated by the title, its purpose was to develop a curriculum for teaching a course in comparative local politics with particular attention to the developed democracies of North America and Western Europe. A team of fourteen was assembled For that purpose; seven from North America and seven from Europe, including the two coordinators from George Washington University and the two from the University of Southern Denmark. Following preparatory work done through e-mail exchanges, a four-day workshop was held in Denmark in May of 2004. Follow-through consisted of courses offered at the University of Southern Denmark and George Washington University in the fall of 2004. Subsequently the curriculum has been drawn on other campuses. One of the lessons learned from this project was the scarcity of research that is genuinely comparative on a cross-national basis, especially work that is transatlantic in scope. That lesson led into the current research project on Regenerating Urban Neighborhoods (RUN). This study builds on the curriculum project by bringing together a multi-national team. It was launched with the support of an invitation to hold a workshop for research design purposes at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Italy.