Project team
Research_
The university and the city
What is the university’s place in fast-changing urban civil societies and economies?
As part of a city’s civic and commercial backbone, the university campus is a dynamic and contested space for economic and political development.
This Australian Research Council Discovery project, running from 2022 to 2024, aims to investigate the changing relationship of the university with the contemporary city. This project expects to generate new knowledge on how the spatial management of the university interfaces with urban economic development, students, and business and philanthropy.
Examining how prevailing concepts such as the neo-liberal and civic university apply on the ground, it will develop a framework and a qualitative dataset for analysing the development of university space that can be used by a range of stakeholders in Australia and internationally.
Universities play a significant role in the urban geographical structure of cities. They typically occupy extensive areas of high value real estate which have accumulated new buildings and facilities over decades. University management has to ensure successful product placement in a highly competitive student market, as well as integrate their campuses within wider city-regions. Yet there have long been tensions between universities and the cities in which they are located, ranging from the historical sense of the campus as being a sheltered space of learning ‘cloistered’ from the industrial modern city.
The future of the university as a spatial entity is under debate, where real estate assets and future capital costs become overheads that are set against investing in the IT infrastructure of the ‘digital campus’ or ‘virtual university’.
With a comprehensive examination of the Australian experience, illuminated by key international examples, the project will develop these standpoints to analyse how universities are embedded in the urban governance and economy of the contemporary city. This should benefit urban policy makers, university management, students and the general public in understanding the place of the university in the contemporary city.
The project is funded through the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project (DP) scheme under the number DP220102094.