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Abstract

This Progress Report reviews recent literature that rethinks the spatiality of the university. First, it discusses the growing body of work that identifies the agency of universities in producing and shaping urban space, including their role in contributing to social injustice in cities. Second, it reviews understandings of universities as sites of relational knowledge production, linking this to the proliferation of studies of student (im)mobility. Third, it considers how the university works to spatially sort and place bodies – students, staff and non-humans.

Keywords

higher education digital platforms students innovation universities

I Introduction

Universities are a long-standing object of social science research. However, they are complex entities, and as objects of study they are elusive. An important role for human geography is its ability to describe and explain the politics of how they are sited within cities, how they are constituted relationally and how they place and sort actors and objects within their territories. This third urban geography Progress Report reviews an array of recent work, including from disciplines outside human geography, that together could be seen as rethinking the university’s relationship to cities. At first sight, this can include an explanation of the role of the university in urban planning, governance and location, a long-standing topic or research that has been revisited in recent years (Addie, 2019; Ruming, 2023; Vallance et al., 2019, Vallance et al., 2020).

However, universities remain awkward, fissile, slippery objects of analysis, and there is a wider literature that queries their very nature. This is a challenge for urban geographers, an opportunity to clarify their spatial ontology: what, exactly, is the campus or the university estate? What is the nature of the knowledge that universities produce, how is it materially distributed in and between cities, and is the powerful role of the university in influencing spatial justice and injustice recognised by university leaderships in a meaningful way? And as universities increasingly invest in digital capabilities, both through in-house sovereignty and third party, privatised knowledge ownership contracts, where are the platforms, locations and sites that the university occupies?

Over the last 20 years, scholars have provided some intriguing guidance on these questions. There have been several important contributions: Robins and Webster (2002), for example, gathered an important early collection of contributions setting out the nature of the ‘digital university’. Engelen et al.’s (2014) account of the financialised turbulence around the property development strategies of the University of Amsterdam highlighted the complex real estate adventures of higher education institutions. Goddard and Vallance (2013) illustrated how ‘engaged’ universities were involved with health, culture and innovation in British cities. Recent years have seen the publication of significant edited volumes of relevance to urbanists: Meusberger et al.’s Geographies of the University (2018) and Pellew and Taylor’s Utopian Universities (2020), and Kapur et al.’s (2023) handbook on Asia-Pacific higher education contain abundant conceptual and empirical discussions.

This review brings together a current crop of writing, from fields ranging from geography to urban planning, higher education to accountancy, that offer guidance on how we might conceptualise the contemporary university as an urban phenomenon. It is organised into three themes. First, it discusses the growing body of work that identifies the on-going role of universities including their role in potentially contributing to social injustice in cities. Second, it reviews understandings of universities as sites of relational knowledge production, linking this to the proliferation of studies of student mobility (and immobility). Third, it considers how the university as an entity works to sort, place and even care for bodies – students, staff and non-humans – in a way that is geographically specific.

II Universities and the contested production of space

The role of universities as aggressive real estate players is not a new topic, but new work continues to develop the seriousness with which these normatively enlightened institutions operate as assertive real estate actors. Building on earlier work such as Engelen et al. (2014), Valverde et al. (2020) suggest that there remains ‘scant international research on universities as financial actors’. They review a range of university strategies in the Toronto context, noting how the financialisation of public assets tends to lead to individualised building by building projects, especially bespoke research or cultural facilities that might attract private funding through endowments and major donations, a process which locks the university into reactive deal-making. Universities areone of several civic institutions where development is shaped by charitable donations, as explained by Fuentenebro and Acuto’s (2021) exploration of philanthropy and the city.

To site these new buildings, large universities often go through waves of expansion into surrounding neighbourhoods. Baldwin’s (2021) In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower provides a strong critique of how the expansion strategies of large American universities have adversely affected established, often African-American, neighbourhoods. In Columbia University in New York, Arizona State University and the University of Chicago, among others, he finds multiple tales of university redevelopment of lower income neighbourhoods with resultant displacement. Gentrification continues to be strongly associated with university estates strategies (Jolivet et al., 2022; Moos et al., 2019; Revington et al., 2023), but in the North American context its reach extends into the governance of many elements of everyday life (Sherman, 2022). For Baldwin: ‘Schools have become the dominant employers, real estate holders, health-care providers, and even policing agents in major cities across the country’ (p. 5).

Some of these processes are replaying contested developments from decades previous, recast in the innovation district frame. University City, by Wolf-Powers (2022), provides an account of how the University of Pennsylvania first drew back from its surrounding fabric during the 1960s and 1970s, then reinvested as part of the ‘return to the city’ urban policy discourse of recent decades. As she notes: ‘In the case of innovation districts constructed in formerly discredited spaces, social elites and private sector real estate investment become associated with skill, knowledge and vitality, and with the economic promise of urbanity’. (2022 p. 14).

The innovation discourse has been ubiquitous within university marketing and policy in recent years, rescripting both the role of scholars and the nature of the campus as being a site of experimentation and invention. Many universities have tried to refigure the academic researcher as something other than the stereotypical reclusive intellectual or boffin devoted to knowledge production for its own sake, replacing it with an ideal type of the energetic, risk-taking inventor ready to bring their intellectual property to market (Kayanan, 2022). This aligns with a spatial reimagining of the university’s sites. As Melhuish (2022) observes in the UK context:

‘the terms “non-campus campus” (Durham Queen’s Campus), “living laboratory” (Newcastle University at Science Central), “urban extension” (Cambridge University), “communiversity” (Sheffield University) and “collaboratory” (Bristol University) have entered circulation via university vision statements, development plans and outreach initiatives’ (pp. 24–25).

It may be instructive to connect this with what Grove and Rickards (2022) see as a broad ‘cybernetic takeover’ of what is valued as knowledge by universities. They ‘are concerned that the institutional landscape is encouraging smooth synthetic knowledge’ (p. 27) in a way that will gradually devalue geographical differences in knowledge production. Central to this is a near-obsessive drive within university incentive systems and strategies to absorb interdisciplinary study in order to instrumentalise it.

On the one hand, this is often presented as a ‘spatial democratisation’ of the university, moving explicitly away from the campus as an ivory tower (itself such an over-used metaphor as to be worthy of some substitution and extension). On the other, it can be seen as a mode of raising the market values of surrounding land. Universities actively partner with private capital to develop new areas; they are also sought out by private developers seeking to demonstrate public benefit for large-scale development opportunities, and who are anxious to gain favourable zoning allowances through delivering promised public benefits. This is aligned with the growth of student housing as an asset class, and processes of ‘studentification’ influence housing markets that are closely related to large universities (Holton, 2016; Holton and Mouat, 2021; Jolivet et al., 2022; Revington, 2022; Revington et al., 2023).

III Universities and their locational entanglements

While the expansion of university campuses into their surrounding neighbourhoods is a seemingly never-ending story, universities are locationally entangled in a more distanciated way. The globalisation of higher education has been detailed extensively (e.g. Robertson and Olds, 2017) and remains geographically salient, given the on-going importance of ‘higher education hubs’ (Olds, 2023), ‘gateway cities’ (Rottleb, 2022), ‘transnational education zones’ (Kleibert et al., 2021) or as anchors of place-based development that defends against or mediates globalisation (Knight et al., 2021). Many universities retain what has been called the ‘branch plant’ or transnational approach to university expansion strategy, a tactic to diversify into different markets (Kleibert, 2021, 2022). The branch plant campuses can act as enclaves in all sorts of unusual ways, including in the ‘de/rerritorialization’ that higher education can have where campuses become enclaves operating to different cultural norms than in the hosting polity (Koh, 2022).

As cost bases escalate, universities increasingly find themselves needing to tap new revenue sources. For Kleibert (2021), universities are caught within the circuits of capital familiar to any students of Marxian space production: ‘Geographic expansion, in highly regulated education markets, is based upon the (perceived) opportunity for profit accumulation in new markets, akin to a spatial fix’. These are linked to the varieties of higher education capitalist models charted by Jessop, 2017 and Vernon (2018). But this may also be linked to a ‘symbolic fix’ of association or affiliation with other places and universities, evident in the proliferation of university strategic partnerships in recent years.

This fix is entirely dependent on student mobility, which brings its own forms of cultural identity formation which is partially implicated in the choice of university (e.g. Kenway, 2018; Kölbel, 2020). But there is also a growing literature on the subject formation that is both forged through the emotional geographies of ‘being’ a student (see, e.g., Reddy, 2019; Sidhu et al., 2020) as well as how that period of the life-course shapes important social trajectories. In her disaggregation of the student mobility process, Beech (2019) discusses the material significance of university rankings, which – while carrying a normative glow of personal intellectual enrichment and horizon-widening – may also carry a certain stigma in terms of employment chances if a degree is obtained from a lower-ranked university. International study in some contexts is not the elite phenomenon it is sometimes presented as, and remains a complex map of intra-regional study patterns and relative exclusiveness.

Universities have also historically been key institutions in the development of settler colonial polities, and the contemporary implications of this is gradually being explored (Bennett et al., 2023; Kidman, 2020). While much of this work involves examining the epistemologies of curriculum and assessment, there is an aligned movement which is reconsidering the spatial impact of universities as settler colonial land occupiers. For example, the historical formation of many university estates, including their source of finance for land, buildings and endowments, are being revisited. Melhuish et al., (2022) contribute a critical heritage perspective that understands universities within their often complex and contested, histories. Alderman and Rose-Redwood (2020) propose various ways in which students might approach the ‘slow toponymic violence’ of place-naming. Naming processes are being increasingly revisited to address previously unacknowledged ethical controversies or racist practices (Viglione and Subbaraman, 2020).

The task of excavating the origin of universities, and the ways in which they have built up land-holdings and campuses, grows in importance as universities – through their digital and territorial adventures – become increasingly detached from the land on which they have developed their institutional credibility. Their role within ‘platform urbanism’, a concept that ties together the materiality of urban fabric with the equally material presence of software platforms (Barns, 2020), requires a significant amount of research. Ever since the explosion of massive on-line open courses in the 2010s, the degree to which universities convert from ‘bricks and mortar’ institutions to educational ‘platform players’ has been an intriguing question. Universities are using a territorial genius loci to licence and accredit digital certificates where students may not ever set foot on the campus, or any other element of the university estate. On the other hand, global education firms such as Pearson increasingly invade the campus. For Williamson (2021), such private education corporations will reshape the values and mechanisms of universities with the global economy: ‘As an actor in the sociotechnical arrangement of markets, the digital platform is a key participant in HE reforms that are intended to align the public mission of universities with the private interests of digital capitalism’.

The digital infrastructural significance of digital platforms ranging from learning management systems (Blackboard, Canvas, Moodle) to AI writing aids (Chat-GPT, Grammarly) to plagiarism detectors (Turnitin) are baked into the server systems of the university and drive many elements of university education policy. And there are a whole range of other digital players that operate on popular social media platforms, and who may live up to their ‘influencer’ job titles, often reviewing university campuses in a range of languages in a way that may shape enrolment choices (Carpenter et al., 2022).

IV Universities sorting, placing and caring for bodies

Universities have long been defined by a particular approach to embodiment. Prominent faculty or benefactors are present either in busts, portraits, or named buildings and thoroughfares. Students have for many centuries been figured in particular ways, notably in debates on the provision of on-campus accommodation in ‘halls of residence’ or residential colleges that were seen as central to inculcating particular values or scholarly norms. The ‘studentification’ of cities, a popular research topic for many years, is evidence of the massification of these earlier modes of placing bodies. However, these visible embodiments are only one part of a wider set of socio-spatial relationships in terms of how universities affect places.

First, universities have a key role in the geographical and biopolitical formation of social and professional identities (Andersson et al. (2012), Turner and Manderson (2007)). Moreover, there is a measurable economic geography of how universities ‘anchor’ graduates to cities (Kitagawa et al., 2022). Compacts between universities and large employers are quite common, and graduate recruitment fairs or less formal alumni recruitment networks tie the university into local labour markets. Degrees awarded by universities are mass, life-shaping moments (Lee and Waters, 2022) that drive many aspects of their enveloping cities and urban areas. The combination of visa regimes and university degrees play an important role in reducing the ability of graduates to move with their degree, despite the discourse of enhanced mobility that is often marketed.

Second, university management actively locate and relocate academics through estates strategies, and academic careers are partly structured by the spatial organisation of campus space. Holden (2022) discusses how one British university reorganised its disciplinary structures as the result of a research assessment exercise: those who didn’t fit within the institution’s plans were relocated into a ‘corridor B’ of ‘spectral’ science researchers without access to laboratory space, thus sealing their fates within a highly competitive science environment. This is the physical spatial displacement of knowledge producers to the point where they can no longer produce knowledge. Campus buildings are for knowledge production that fits strategic goals: ‘non-conforming academics and non-conforming disciplines are those whose knowledge production practices and outputs resist synthesis into widely interdisciplinary collaborations and pragmatic solutions’ (Grove and Rickards, 2022: 29)

Third, universities are key players in bioeconomic state strategies (Ong, 2016). There remains much work to be done on how university hospitals and research institutes mediate clinical trials and drug discovery, for example. Universities are a key part of the ‘medical-industrial complex’, and are also active in a range of non-human life scientific domains. In their discussion of biomolecular science innovation in Finland, Ahlqvist and Sirvio (2019) provide some clues about how embedded universities play a role in transforming locally significant industries yet with far-reaching bioeconomic consequences. University campuses host significant populations of animals that are used in scientific experimentation. In their longitudinal ethnographic study of a cohort of animal technologists in UK universities, Roe and Greenhough (2023) describe the complications that arise when ‘care, harm and killing are embedded in the same place’.

Fourth, universities are gathering points of a range of publics and individuals: some display conflictual and aggressive behaviours that challenge the normative appearance of the university as a space of reasoned, enlightened debate (controversial as those terms can be, of course). For example, Boyer (2022) notes that higher education spaces ‘have become increasingly recognised as particularly problematic sites for sexual harassment and other forms of gender violence’ (p. 406). Similarly, the campus has become a flashpoint in sexual and gender politics: Nash et al. (2019) illustrate how campuses in three different countries were sites of heteroactivism, where assertive campaigns against gender and sexual rights were framed within freedom of speech metanarratives.

V Conclusion

This review ends by suggesting a connection with the wider discussion around ‘geographies of education’ by Kraftl et al. (2022). It is interesting to reflect on how universities sit within a spatial network of schools, technical institutes and other spaces of knowledge acquisition and enculturation, and how their urban condition can be explained through a closer attention to higher education scholarship.

There is an important research agenda ahead that charts how universities are embedded in different ways in a geographically diverse range of cities. It is noticeable that much of the extant literature reviewed relates to a small number of advanced capitalist states – the UK, Canada, US and Australia. Critical assessments of the spatial entanglements of universities outside these global North cities remain quite limited in English, though Kapur et al.’s (2023) major edited collection on Asia-Pacific higher education partly addresses this shortfall (see also Addie et al., 2019).

And so, as noted in the introduction, one of the specific challenges facing human geographers is to capture the ‘spatial ontology’ of the university. There are a wide range of locational metaphors which describe the campus: for example, the discussion of student ‘catchments’ was a materially central element to the rapid expansion of the university sector in the 1960s (Pellew and Taylor, 2020). There is the (im)mobility of the student body, including their stacking in ever higher, denser, more privatised student accommodation (Holton and Mouat, 2021). There are questions over the future spaces of the university library, and the material storage of knowledge via books, journal papers and courses, both analogue and digital (Walton and Matthews, 2013). The university as a centre of calculation, co-presence and knowledge validation and certification exists as an organisational format, perhaps, laid out on a spatial template via room timetabling, staff offices and laboratories, held together by a system of diverse labour contracts and practices, from elite salary packages to unpaid social labour (Magoqwana et al., 2020; Parker et al., 2021). The spatial object of the university is unstable:

Academics and administrators may not consciously visualise universities as physical places, but rather as a complex organisation of teaching and research programmes that need to be accommodated. Estates teams may only see universities as spatial and operational entities that pose particular issues around maintenance and running costs. (p. 29)

These co-existing and sometimes conflicting views of the nature of the university will remain a fascinating issue at a time when universities are booming globally. This is a distinct challenge for urban geographers, an opportunity to explain, excavate and evoke their spatial ontology, both in contiguous sites and in distanciated relations, in digital platforms and in bricks and mortar.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Donald McNeill

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Urban Geography III: Universities and their spaces

Abstract

Keywords

I Introduction

II Universities and the contested production of space

III Universities and their locational entanglements

IV Universities sorting, placing and caring for bodies

V Conclusion

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

References