The Joint Center for Environmental and Urban Problems was established
in July 1972, by its inclusion in the legislative special projects
budget and with support from the Florida Board of Regents. It
got there through the strong support of State Senator Bob Graham,
later Governor and now United States Senator, and through other
legislative backing. Senator Graham and I, among others, including
a House Republican from the Fort Lauderdale area, met at the
Mai-Kai Restaurant in Fort Lauderdale and formulated a plan for
what we first called the Center for Urban and Environmental Studies that
would focus on applied research and public service. I was in the midst
of helping lay out Florida’s first try at putting a system in place to
assure the better management of its very strong growth pressures, with the
full support of Governor Reubin Askew. Both Graham and I were frustrated
by the failure of the state university system to be better organized so as
to be useful to and used by local, regional, and state agencies involved
in finding better ways to manage the state’s growth. To us the time
had come to change that by getting a university center in place to fill
the gap.
The Joint Center for Environmental and Urban Problems was the result.
An applied research and public-service unit that would join the resources
of the two state universities in Southeast Florida - FAU and FIU - but
one that could also reach out to other state universities and, through
my involvement in efforts to manage growth and change around the nation
and beyond, draw ideas from national and international growth strategies.
The major purpose of this short piece is to make it clear that the original mission of the Joint Center and the actions to achieve that mission have not changed in the past 30 years. The mission was and is to be useful to and used by local, regional, and state agencies as they struggle to effectively implement Florida’s growth management system.
Some key assumptions shaped and continue to shape the Center’s activities. The first was the strong conviction that environmental and urban issues are in fact joined, and that you can’t deal with one without the other. This assumption rejects the notion that you can have a clean environment or a strong economy but not both. The next key assumption was that local governments acting in isolation from one another could never effectively manage their growth; it must be approached on a regional basis, which in turn called for a state/regional/local framework in which local, state, and regional actions were mutually supportive of each other.
As an applied research and public-service unit, the Joint Center is not directly involved in teaching, although its applied research and public-service projects continue to have a major positive impact on teaching, not only at FAU and FIU, but also throughout the state university system and beyond.
And so, to reiterate, Joint Center conducted and funded research is aimed at producing and making available research results to public and private agencies attempting to deal with environmental and urban problems. That was the Joint Center’s goal at the beginning in 1972, and it is still its goal 30 years later.
