David Perry, a longtime urban planner and Chicago professor who focused on strengthening cities and making urban spaces serve residents, has died at age 82.
He died Dec. 2 at home following a long illness, his family said.
Mr. Perry was the director of the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois Chicago for nearly 12 years. He was also an urban planning and policy professor at UIC and served as associate chancellor for the Great Cities Commitment. He retired from the university in 2018.
He also served on several public projects, including Chicago’s Zoning Reform Commission, the Urban Land Institute’s National Public Infrastructure Committee and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
Judith Kossy, his wife of 30 years, told the Sun-Times that Mr. Perry had a “profound sense of social justice” and his guiding philosophy was to “live your values.”
He was also curious and eager to learn from his students, Kossy said.
“David was never the professor who behaved like the font of all wisdom,” she said. “Rather, he treated his students as peers and joined them in exploring key questions, ‘What’s different here, and how does it affect our thinking about cities and the people who live there?’”
He championed engaged research, Kossy said. Whenever Mr. Perry would go into a community to do research, he would treat the people he studied as partners and would share his findings with them to help address the problems facing their community.
Mr. Perry wrote or edited 11 books and over 150 articles, book chapters and reports that focused on economic development, race, politics, urban violence, public infrastructure, urban space and the role of universities and community foundations in American cities.
Integrating universities with the surrounding community was especially a passion for Mr. Perry. In 2014, he delivered a guest lecture at the University of Washington in Tacoma in which he asserted that “universities need to be community-based organizations.”
He pointed to the once-neglected section of the Loop that was transformed into a hub for higher education, including DePaul’s downtown campus, Columbia College and Roosevelt University.
“The academic corridor is no longer the desolate hole in the downtown doughnut. It’s a new anchor of Chicago’s development in the Loop,” Mr. Perry said. “It’s a 24/7 educational corridor with clusters in the knowledge economy.”
Mr. Perry earned his doctoral degree from Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. He taught in the government department at the University of Texas at Austin and chaired the urban planning program at SUNY Buffalo.
He was also a senior faculty fellow of New York’s Rockefeller Institute and held joint appointments as professor of public administration and professor of political science at UIC.
Aside from his work, Mr. Perry’s joys were his family and friends, music, skiing and traveling.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by his sons, Clayton Perry and Evan Perry; his daughters-in-law, Jamie Perry and Veronica Perry; and four grandchildren, Sam, Jack, Colin and Dillon.
