Columbia University is trying to get community buy-in for their expansion, and has produced some interesting articles and such as a side effect. Bottom line, though, is it's gonna happen.

The Manhattanville Project
By DAPHNE EVIATAR

Certainly Columbia's plans are ambitious: across a large swath of Upper Manhattan, the university wants to create an academic enclave that will both nurture intellectual progress and revitalize an urban area. Piano's design aims to accomplish both. The campus will have wide, open streets that offer a broad view of the waterfront. Along the main thoroughfares, the lower floors of the academic buildings will be mostly glass — "they will be floating," as Piano puts it — filled with shops, restaurants and arts spaces serving the broader public of Harlem and the Upper West Side. The designs are still preliminary, and plans for specific buildings have yet to be developed. But Piano, who also designed The New York Times's new headquarters, now under construction, and a well-received addition to the Morgan Library, is committed to designing the space to promote these integrationist aims. "You will feel part of the community," Piano told me when we met at Columbia's Prentis Hall, a white-tiled former milk-bottling plant on Manhattanville's southern edge. Indeed, Piano's drawings, on display in the sunny ground-floor workshop, depict transparent skyscrapers lining ample boulevards with ethereal-looking pedestrians ambling along them.

But in the eyes of many local residents, Piano's optimistic rendering obscures the fact that to fulfill its vision, the university will have to bulldoze almost everything that's already there. About 1,600 people are currently employed in this part of Manhattanville, and some 400 live there. Many residents are disturbed by the placement of the campus between a park being built at the West Harlem Pier and the community that fought for years to have that park created. Meanwhile, most everyone expects that the university's arrival will accelerate the gentrification that is already transforming the historically black neighborhood of Harlem — to the benefit of some residents and the harm of others.