‘A place for the unexpected, integrated into the city structure’: universities as agents of cosmopolitan urbanism

Abstract

The role of formal architecture and urbanism in representing and reinforcing hegemonic power structures, ideologies, and identities is well-established (King 1990, 2004, Rabinow 1996, Yeoh 2001, Mishra and Hodge 1991. Universities, as élite institutions tied to state agendas (Bender 1988(Bender /1998(Bender /2002, and as major landowners, urban developers and financially well-endowed clients for architecture, have historically been significant actors in these processes. This paper discusses the evolution of new forms of university spatial and architectural development which are framed by discourses around inclusive, diverse, and cosmopolitan urban identities and heritage, transcending nationhood.Bender points out that one of the most distinctive features of major university institutions, drawing staff and students from across regions and around the world, is the way they ground complex, transnational, cosmopolitan communities and identities in local place -much like 'contemporary immigrant neighborhoods where residents live in local urban neighborhoods and diasporic networks' (Bender 2002: 162). He suggests that the sociology of the university is much like that of the city (Bender 1998). Across UK universities (and university cities) in 2015-16, 81% of undergraduate students were from the UK, with 6% from the EU and 14% from the rest of the world, but 46% of students studying at postgraduate level were from outside the UK, with a large majority of international students coming from China at both levels 3 . 29% of staff in UK universities were from overseas in the same year, with 16.9% from the EU and 12.1% from outside the EU 4 . As Bender says, 'Teachers and students in a university, much like the new metropolitans, live at once in the past and the present, in a local place and a trans-local culture of international scholarship. They must constantly bring together in fruitful ways the past and present, the local and the trans-local' (Bender 2002: 162-163). This perspective provides a starting-point from which to investigate the impact of the university intervention, materialised in built form and space, on the wider spatial and social landscape of big cosmopolitan cities, made up of many diverse, mobile, cultural and ethnic communities.The paper proposes that the two scales of urban and global identity can be brought together within a 'cosmopolitanist' vision of the university in its urban setting as a locus of intercultural contact and transnational flows, embodied by the university community. This vision then further shapes its relations and engagement at neighbourhood level with surrounding urban communities which are in many cases defined both by ethnic diversity and cultural difference, and by exclusion both from universities themselves and from the opportunities offered by the new evolving knowledge economies for which universities are the drivers. It will argue that, in counterpoint to critics of university-led redevelopment such as Bose (2015), many universities are engaging with an inclusive politics of...