ABSTRACT
Academic and health care institutions are contrarian players in the twentyfirst-century urban economy. While the new economy is borderless and global, they remain place-based.*
In the new economy, a typical corporation can be located at any one of a variety of sites. Consider, for example, two Fortune 500 corporations: Comcast and Campbell’s Soup. These corporations could be headquartered in many locations other than Philadelphia and Camden; like many other corporations before them, they could have chosen to move out rather than invest in expansion projects within their home cities. Institutions such as the University of Pennsylvania and Cooper University Hospital have fewer options, however. Their continued presence in Philadelphia and Camden, where they were founded and grew up, is a necessity because, for them, location matters. In his bestselling book, Thomas L. Friedman described the ways in which globalization has leveled the economic playing field; in terms of economic competition, he wrote, the twenty-first-century world is “flat.”1
