The University and the City

John Goddard, Paul Vallance

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415589925
• eBook ISBN: 9781135082758
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Universities are being seen as key urban institutions by researchers and policy makers around the world. They are global players with significant local direct and indirect impacts – on employment, the built environment, business innovation and the wider society. The University and the City explores these impacts and in the process seeks to expose the extent to which universities are just in the city, or part of the city and actively contributing to its development.

The precise expression of the emerging relationship between universities and cities is highly contingent on national and local circumstances. The book is therefore grounded in original research into the experience of the UK and selected English provincial cities, with a focus on the role of universities in addressing the challenges of environmental sustainability, health and cultural development. These case studies are set in the context of reviews of the international evidence on the links between universities and the urban economy, their role in 'place making' and in the local community.

The book reveals the need to build a stronger bridge between policy and practice in the fields of urban development and higher education underpinned by sound theory if the full potential of universities as urban institutions is to be realised. Those working in the field of development therefore need to acquire a better understanding of universities and those in higher education of urban development. The insights from both sides contained in The University and the City provide a platform on which to build well founded university and city partnerships across the world.

1  Introduction

Aims and scope

The subject of this book is relationships between universities and cities and how they shape wider processes of urban or regional development. This situates the book in a well-established field of research on the contribution that universities make to sub-national territorial development (see Lawton Smith 2007; Perry and Harloe 2007; Goddard and Vallance 2011). The focus on cities, however, suggests a departure from the previously dominant concern in this field on universities as agents of knowledge-based development in the economic and political spaces of regions. Although the boundaries demarcating cities within larger regions are almost always blurred – and indeed at points in this book we move between these and other intermediate scalar units such as city-regions – we would suggest that this shift in focus of study has a twofold significance.

On a simple empirical level, it reflects the specific location of most universities in cities of some description. The resultant spatial relationship, whether the university campus is based in the urban centre or an outlying suburb, necessarily carries social and economic impacts for the city or city-region of which it is part. For the university, this urban location – even if it is not integral to the institution’s identity – forces a relationship with other institutional actors and communities that are also inhabitant in the city. It also raises challenging normative questions about the need for academic practice to be of direct relevance and value to the local contexts or, more generally, the type of social environment in which most of its practitioners live and work (see Bender 1998; Nature 2010; May and Perry 2011a).

On a conceptual level, the city as an object of study encourages exploration of a more broadly-conceived territorial development process than just that focused on economic growth and competitiveness. The relationship between the university and the city is a multi-faceted one of distinct but interrelating physical, social, economic and cultural dimensions. While interpretations of sub-national territorial planning and development more generally may accommodate multiple factors along these lines, a focus on the city – where the concentration of human life means these dimensions come into closer and more frequent contact – strengthens this plural viewpoint. This is also supported by recent theoretical imaginings of the city as a source of heterogeneous social, economic and material relations or development assets, rather than the product of a single dominant process (e.g. circulation of capital) or quality of the urban environment (e.g. agglomeration) (see Amin and Graham 1997; Storper 1997; Healey 2002). Relational views of the city as constituted through diverse (and fragmented) sets of local and non-local network linkages have also challenged understandings of its spatiality as a clearly bounded and coherent geographical or institutional entity (e.g. see Amin and Thrift 2002). A concern with the interplay of territorial and relational geographies (McCann and Ward 2010) seems germane to understanding the university as, on the one hand, a place-embedded institution with connections into the different social and institutional spheres of its locality, and on the other hand, a generative node in national and international flows of knowledge and people (especially highly-mobile students).

Elements of this relationship between universities and cities have been studied from historical, sociological and geographical perspectives in previous edited collections, journal special issues,¹ and individual papers (e.g. Bender 1988a; van der Wusten 1998; Perry and Wiewel 2005; Russo et al. 2007; Wiewel and Perry 2008). With this full-length monograph, our goal is to make a distinctive contribution to this literature through enabling a more comprehensive single-focused treatment of this diverse subject. In particular, across the different review and empirical parts of the book we aim to encompass and bring more fully into dialogue differing standpoints on this problem along three lines:

1   Between local economic or social impacts that follow from a university just being present within a city (e.g. related to campus developments, attraction of students to live in the city, employment of large numbers of staff and other knock-on economic effects) and those that arise from more active ‘engagement’ by the institution or its academic community in the development of its city.

2   Between the economic focus of most previous work on universities and regional development and a more holistic view of the varied societal interactions universities can have within their cities (relating to, for instance, community engagement, social inclusiveness or equality, urban and regional governance, environmental sustainability, health and wellbeing, cultural and civic life).

3   Between the ‘external’ regional and urban development role of universities and the ‘internal’ processes – whether in the organisational domain of institutional structures and culture or in the governance domain of state higher education policy – that enable and shape these external relationships.

These three spectrums represent the primary themes of the book that the chapters outlined below aim to address. Over the course of the book, a number of strong secondary themes emerge, several of which will be discussed together in the concluding chapter. These include:

•   the differences between the university as an institution, a set of academic sub-groupings, and a population of students resident in the city;

•   the role of physical sites and regeneration projects in facilitating and connecting university economic and community engagement in the city;

•   the importance of inter-institutional relationships between the multiple universities (or other types of higher education institution) likely to be present in large cities;

•   the interdisciplinarity of many societal ‘challenges’ within cities (e.g. sustainable development, public health, etc.) and the institutional tension this creates with existing disciplinary-based academic structures;

•   the role of intermediary organisations or organisational units in engagement between the university and the city;

•   the use of the city and its various communities as an ‘urban laboratory’ for academic research, engagement and knowledge transfer.

Structure of the book

The main body of this book is divided into two parts. Part I (chapters 2–5) is based on review of existing academic literature and other secondary material relating to universities and city/regional development in an international perspective. Part II (chapters 6–10) is based on original research around specific thematic areas in a selection of English cities (Bristol, Newcastle upon Tyne, Manchester and Sheffield). This sole focus on the UK in the empirical component of the book, as well as for practical research reasons, reflects our belief that university and city relations are contingent on the particular configuration of higher education and territorial governance systems, and therefore their in-depth investigation should be based in a specific detailed context (see Chapter 6). The concluding chapter summarises the unifying themes from this empirical work and discusses how they can contribute to furthering understanding of university and city development relationships more generally.

The next two chapters examine institutional-level social and economic impacts of the urban university’s presence ‘in the city’ drawing on international examples from the academic literature. Chapter 2 focuses on how universities shape the built environment and urban social geography of cities. Chapter 3 focuses on the more ‘passive’ economic impacts that universities have on cities (in contrast to their ‘engaged’ role in innovation covered in Chapter 4). The types of social and economic impacts covered across these two chapters are institutional (e.g. through property development, employment and expenditure in the local economy) and student-based (e.g. ‘studentification’ of residential neighbourhoods in the city, labour market effects through migration and entry into local labour markets).

Chapter 4 turns to the more active ‘engaged’ role of universities in supporting innovation in urban and regional economies. The first half of the chapter reviews the economic geography literature on universities and regional or metropolitan innovation systems. This review supports a more broadly-conceived ‘developmental’ rather than ‘generative’ perspective on the role of universities (Gunasekara 2006) that emphasises their contribution to collective institutional capacity for local innovation as much as their direct commercialisation of knowledge. Related to this, in the evolutionary framework adopted for the chapter as a whole, we suggest that the diversity of knowledge, practices and organisational resources supported within universities (and not the private sector) means their place in regional innovation systems should be understood as a source of ‘slack’ that can add to the long-term adaptability of the economy. The second half of this chapter continues the focus on the university as a heterogeneous and decentralised set of academic sub-units by discussing the adaptation of ‘loosely-coupled’ internal university structures as a form of organisational innovation within the wider territorial innovation system. This involves examination of three different views of the ‘entrepreneurial university’ from the literature, all of which emphasise the development of specialist interdisciplinary research centres and other intermediary structures that facilitate engagement in the economy. The chapter concludes by pointing to the limits of this university adaptation approach in terms of the conceptualisation of the ‘external environment’ to which the university responds as an (implicitly national) higher education funding environment.

Chapter 5 begins to address this limitation by examining how the wider city and regional governance context for ‘civic universities’ may be elucidated. The focus shifts from the economic to the wider societal role of the university, and this is positioned in a framework of more holistic conceptual understandings of city and regional development. The main concern of the chapter is to introduce a distinction between the facilitating and constraining policy and governance conditions (here phrased in terms of drivers and barriers) that relate to university engagement in economic development and those that relate to engagement in local societal development. This argument is developed through reference to secondary material from a series of OECD reviews of higher education in city and regional development. Three European cities/city-regions are taken as our cases: Berlin, Rotterdam and Jyväskylä (in central Finland). The material reviewed points to the policy and governance drivers for extensive, sustained and strategic university involvement in local economic innovation activity being stronger than they are for engagement in activities to combat social exclusion in these cities. The chapter concludes by identifying three thematic areas that combine societal and economic development concerns and form the basis of chapters in the second half of the book: sustainable urban development, public health and medicine, and links with the cultural sector.

Chapter 6 introduces the second half of the book and outlines the UK higher education and sub-national territorial governance systems as a background to the subsequent empirical chapters. The chapter begins by outlining the original research carried out for the book and notes the importance of the rapidly-changing political and economic circumstances against which it has taken place. This also introduces material from an online survey on the research ‘impacts’ of individual academics that is included in this book as Appendix B and informs the thematic content of the three following chapters. The core of this chapter is three sub-sections covering: the development of the UK higher education system since the abolition of the binary university–polytechnic divide in 1992; changes in the UK (and more specifically English) territorial governance system over roughly the same twenty year period, with a particular focus on the implications for cities; and the intersections between these two distinct governance domains. This third sub-section shows that, while higher education policy in the UK is predominately spatially neutral, the incorporation of universities into regional and city-level science and innovation governance that developed under the post 1997 Labour government helped introduce some local development dimension into the mission of universities. However, the top-down and centralist form this regional architecture took meant that this dimension was limited and seemingly has not survived a recent change of government. A final section provides a brief general profile of the multi-university higher education sectors in the four cities covered in the following three chapters.

Chapters 7 to 9 explore the relationships between these universities and their cities around the three thematic areas identified above. The empirical investigation is based on a pair of cities for each chapter; matching our home city of Newcastle with Manchester for sustainable urban development (Chapter 7), with Sheffield for public health and medicine (Chapter 8), and with Bristol for links with the cultural sector (Chapter 9). The purpose is not a comparison of the two cities (although parallels and contrasts between them are employed as an analytical device), but using the empirical material from both cases to highlight key relationships and processes in relation to the particular thematic area in question. In Chapter 7, these central elements include the relationship between the institutional and academic roles of universities in sustainable urban development, and how these are mobilised by intermediary economic development or regeneration vehicles and the use of ‘urban laboratory’ concepts in the two cities. In Chapter 8 the main focus is how university health and medical faculty engagement with the city is shaped by their main institutional relationships (principally with the National Health Service). The two cases covered in this chapter have slightly different foci: in Sheffield our research concentrated on health research and teaching in the two universities and related engagement with the City Council as well as local NHS trusts; in Newcastle it included discussion of relationships with various regional and city agencies seeking to draw on university medical science strengths for the purposes of economic development or regeneration. In Chapter 9 the key concern is how cultural engagement by universities (whether primarily social, economic, or purely artistic in objective) takes place through specific sites or venues within the city, and how this varies between those sites that are located on or off the university campus. The first half of the chapter provides an overview of the link between key university cultural activities and spaces in the two cities. The second half of the chapter comprises more detailed examples from both cities in the area of creative media and digital technology practice; Newcastle University’s Culture Lab and the Watershed’s Pervasive Media Studio in which the two universities in Bristol are now partners.

At various points throughout the book we refer to one of a number of ideal models of universities – e.g. the ‘urban university’, the ‘entrepreneurial university’, the ‘civic university’ – that imply varying relationships with the city. In particular, we are interested in further exploring (specifically in a city setting) the idea of the civic university, which is more centrally ‘engaged’ in its locality than universities that effectively just happen to be located in an urban area, and driven more by the public benefits it generates for society (see Calhoun 2006) than the business-focused entrepreneurial university. The term civic university has a specific historical meaning in relation to public universities founded in the nineteenth century (Delanty 2002), particularly in industrial cities in England (see Barnes 1996; Walsh 2009). However, more recently one of us has argued (in a UK context) in favour of the ‘reinvention’ of the civic university for the current day, based around principles of a constitutive relationship with the society of which it is part, the promotion of institution-wide ‘holistic’ engagement, and collaborative relationships with other higher education institutions (see Goddard 2009). This concern is taken up more explicitly in the concluding chapter and related to some of the connecting themes throughout the empirical chapters and book as a whole regarding the societal, economic and physical dimensions of relationships between universities and cities.

Part I

Review: international dimensions

2 The university in the city I: place and community

Introduction to the university in the city

A key subtext to this book’s focus on the relationship between universities and cities is the aim of further exploring the notion of a renewed civic university, that is engaged through research, teaching and public service with the city and region of which it is part, and draws on this connection to form its identity within the global academic community (Goddard 2009). However, regardless of the degree to which an urban-located university is linked to its surroundings through these activities, it is safe to assume its presence alone within a city ensures substantial physical, social, economic and cultural impacts on the urban environment. Therefore, before proceeding to examine the more active or intentional role of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Review International dimensions
• The university in the city I Place and community
• The university in the city II Economic impacts
• Universities, innovation and economic development
• City social and economic development Drivers and barriers to university engagement in three European cities1
• Research the UK context
• Higher education and cities in the UK
• Universities, sustainability and urban development
• Universities and health Institutional relationships in the city
• Universities and the cultural sector of cities
• The embeddedness of universities in the city and the city in the university
• Appendix A Interviews
• Appendix B Findings from a survey of individual academics' research impacts
• Notes
• References
• Index