Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Universities are quintessentially urban institutions and cannot avoid a relationship with the myriad of other institutions and communities that also inhabit the city, including local authorities responsible for the place in the round, businesses, and civil society.

This author explores the changing nature of links between the university and the city in both theory and practice, outlining a model of the civic university engaged with global challenges that have an urban dimension. He illustrates the arguments with reference to the experience of universities working with selected cities in England. In doing so he uses the notion of the university as an urban anchor institution tying down the global in the local as a key principle and explores the tensions between drivers in the global higher education market place and city needs.

This chapter deals with the conceptual change of university buildings and the spatial relationship between university, town, and landscape through the centuries to the present.

Universities developed in Europe from small courtyard collegiums to three-wing palaces up to the eighteenth century and became monumental blocks at the end of the nineteenth century, always integrated into urban patterns, connected to public streets and squares. Beginning in the seventeenth century, however, a new typology arose in North Americathe campus, with its detached buildings surrounding quads, or lawns, in attractive countryside locations outside towns. University lifestyle became related to landscape, parks, and nature. The campus concept has influenced university planning the world over since the twentieth century, combined with ideas of the European Modern Movement of architecture and urban design.

Ideas about university life now appear to be changing to a kind of reurbanization. The campus today is increasingly envisioned more as situated in urban life with all its many opportunities, challenges, risks, and choices than in landscape and rural sceneries.

In the global knowledge economy, attracting and retaining talent is the most important mutual goal of universities and cities. They work together in the worldwide competition for talent. The locations of universities play an important role in the competitive profile of cities and regions because they concentrate this human capital. Simultaneously, the ideal university campus is increasingly resembling a city, with hotels and housing, restaurants, cafés, cultural and sports facilities, business space, and the traditional office and academic space. The campus of the future could be “the city” or “a city” in itself. The authors of this chapter seek to deepen understanding of the dynamic campus–city relations by describing the past, present, and future trends of the physical settings and functional mix of campuses. They discuss two extreme campus models and their associated advantages and disadvantages. The chapter might help stakeholders in universities and cities improve decisions that support their mutual goals.

As decided almost unanimously by Heidelberg’s city council, the International Building Exhibition (IBA) addressing “knowledge-based urbanism” began operating in late 2012. It involves a ten-year urban laboratory that focuses on feasible spatial potential for innovation originating and pursued in different milieus and institutions of the knowledge-based society. A call to have projects use this platform, think-tank, and development agency proposes a combination of bottom-up and top-down strategies with which to reinvent the IBA tradition by integrating public and private interests discursively, structurally, and financially. Though unable to fund the construction of buildings themselves, the IBA Heidelberg generates and shapes ideas and brings together project leaders and decision-makers in the fields of education, science, and research to address future challenges and potential in the “knowledge pearl” that Heidelberg represents.

The rise of global competition in a knowledge society and budget cuts in public spending have spurred an interest in the effects of universities on their regional economies. In contrast to the legacy of local impact analysis, this study examines the economic impact of an entire university landscape on a large regional economy: the federal state of Baden-Württemberg in Germany. Its methodology overcomes some of the traditional challenges and develops a differential incidence approach by benchmarking the impacts of universities against alternative public expenditures. Empirically, this study reveals that Baden-Württemberg’s nine public universities multiply initial state funding by a factor higher than two in regional impact. They account for an annual aggregate economic impact of €3.7 billion in value-added, 63,000 jobs, and €350 million in tax revenues. The attraction of students and research funding from outside the regional economy are found to be major levers when compared to alternative public expenditures.

Regional engagement of universities is a rather new issue. Africa has become a battlefield of conflicting notions of the role of universities and the meaning of their “third” mission. The author asserts that regional knowledge spillovers in Africa emerge differently than those on other continents, particularly when peripheral universities in a nonmetropolitan context are involved. Because empirical evidence on knowledge communication between the university and its regional economy is largely absent in Africa, this chapter presents a case study of three universities in the bilingual country of Cameroon. Given the weakness or absence of spillovers of codified communication—usually defined as “visible” measures of regional engagement reported in the international literature—the chapter offers anecdotal evidence of various kinds of almost “invisible” communication between the university and its region, predominantly through research. The author concludes that the African university still has much to do to improve its regional engagement.

A large number of students from Sub-Saharan Africa pursue their education abroad, but few return to their native countries. This lack of academics caused by migration processes is often referred to as a . Are those few who do return and start working in academia able to settle in the higher education sector and create a ? In addressing this, the author draws on empirical data gained from returning graduates’ experiences entering the labor market in Ghana and Cameroon. The interpretation of this data suggests that, despite the challenging and often lengthy process of finding a position, working in the sector of higher education can stimulate development processes. The comparison also shows that the expertise of returning Cameroonian academics is not yet fully tapped by their native country’s higher education sector, while in Ghana conditions in this area seem to be better.

Relations between China and the countries of ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) have been thickening, but are conventionally viewed through the lens of the economy. This does poor justice to the longstanding, and wide-ranging relations between the two, including knowledge relations.

Focusing on China’s southern borderlands, and their knowledge relations with ASEAN, particularly in higher education, the complexity and evolution of relations is sketched by use of what is termed the Six Pillars, before a closer study of “Borderlands” University is undertaken, revealing close and evolving, if unequal, connections between China’s southern borderlands and Viet Nam.

The analysis shows that both region and regionalism need to be problematized, including in higher education. While ASEAN is understood as a region, the range and depth of relations between China and ASEAN, increasingly including higher education relations, poses the question of the extent to which China-ASEAN should be understood as a region. Conventional conceptions of regulatory regionalism are also tested by the analysis, that shows much of cross-border flows to be illegal and irregular. Irregular regionalism is argued to be a better characterization of the relationship.

In some respects, the impact of globalization on universities is well rehearsed (competition for international students; the drive for status in global rankings; the opening of overseas campuses; the dream of massive open online courses and other forms of digital education), but the relationship between universities as place-based institutions and globalization is less well understood. It is on that this chapter focuses. Drawing on work undertaken as part of an Economic and Social Research Council project (“Higher Education and Regional Social Transformation”) the author sets the arguments in a wider context. He explores the extent to which and ways in which universities have become key players in the reimagination of their city regions in a (neoliberal) global context. As well as reflecting on the wider public (and local) role of universities, he also considers how universities use the tools available to them to position themselves effectively as successful businesses within the new world in which they find themselves.

The author examines the geography of the contemporary university through an exploration of the manner in which students’ and institution’s roots and routes intersect and conflict.

She discusses such intersections and conflicts through a broad overview of student mobility globally and then through a close-up analysis of the manner in which a group of mobile students from Asia, and the university in which they are studying, respond to the book . The author asks what their responses to the book—and indeed ideas about it—mean for current conceptions of the university and for the global geopolitics of knowledge. Overall, she argues that the university, as an institution, now needs to be understood not just as territorial, as a place of institutional, national, and subnational , but also as a place of global, regional, and transnational . As such it needs to be recognized as unbound.