Worldwide the higher education (HE) sector is undergoing rapid and sometimes radical change. The UK government wants to reach a target of 50% participation and Europe is committed to university reform to support economic competitiveness. New campus buildings, many of them technically innovative as well as creative in how they accommodate the activities that go on inside them, are going up all around the country. Growth in student numbers is driving changes in residential patterns. This can be problematic as well as exciting and invigorating for a city or neighbourhood. Following a seminar on these issues on 1o January 2007 Building Futures decided to do some research on the possible impacts of university expansion on towns and cities.
AIM
The main aim is to generate debate, initially through a series of themed, empirically grounded but speculative and normative essays on the transformations already underway. We are specifically concerned with the implications for the built environment.
At the moment most universities still have architectural as well as institutional boundaries but the current changes are shifting the relationships between universities and the rest of society. We are only beginning to get a sense of the possible changes in the way we experience of towns and cities, and we are barely aware of the broader transformations underway as the social, economic and cultural role of higher education is moulded to fit a post-industrial rather than an industrial economy.
Some people imagine change in the university sector as a continuum through history from an epoch of pure research to today’s commercial science ‘parks’ and university spin-offs. But since the seventeenth century at least, universities have been part of states’ commercial efforts. The aims of the project are to support a debate that is clearer about what has changed and what is changing within HE and in the relationship between the host communities and regions and universities.
The themes that we might look at include: mergers and the emergence of extremely large universities and campuses; international university brands and the global reach of the new HE market (for both students and staff); funding patterns; social and cultural roles of higher education; universities and the idea of innovation and creativity. We hope to provoke discussion about these important changes, many of which are being pushed through with tremendous enthusiasm and speed and with long-term, large-scale consequences. We want to make a space for considering what a good learning environment should be and how change in the university can best be managed.
For more information on this project contact Eeva Burgland at eeva.berglund@inst.riba.org or Tamsie Thomson at tamsie.thomson@inst.riba.org
