Studentification as gendered urban process: student geographies of housing in Waterloo, Canada

Abstract

ABSTRACT Research on ‘studentification’, or the concentration of students in particular neighbourhoods, whether in older shared rental housing or new purpose-built student accommodations, has neglected questions of difference, including gender. Yet while such questions have been the purview of student geographies more broadly, the latter have seldom extended analyses to neighbourhood-scale urban processes. Just as feminist urban geographers have shown gentrification to be a gendered phenomenon, I demonstrate how studentification likewise relies on and (re)produces certain gender relations, drawing on a case study of Waterloo, Canada. Specifically, studentification is linked to women’s enrolment trends, masculinist modes of profit-oriented urban development, and gendered discourses of urban safety. The analysis highlights the need for renewed dialogue between disparate literatures on the geography of studentification and student geographies of housing and home to further our understanding of the role of social difference in studentification processes.