Abstract
Knowledge and creative businesses and industries have been at the core of discussions for urban renewal strategies worldwide. Educational facilities and the businesses they attract are key elements in urban dynamics, helping to promote urban diversity and contributing to enhancing the areas where they are imbedded. In Portugal, the higher education system follows a binary structure, in which institutions are divided into Universities and Polytechnics. The latter, whose mission is creating vocational-oriented knowledge, grounded on the specific needs of the regions they are in, are key regional drivers, with the possibility of becoming developers and promotors at a regional scale, affecting urban life and urban quality. This paper aims at exploring the location of polytechnic institutions within their hosting cities, attempting to understand location patterns and similarities among different institutions, as well as envisaging the impact of such a location in the engagement with the hosting city. The research is developed at two scales: the first (a) focuses on the location of the institution in its hosting city, while the second (b) focuses on the relative deepness of the internal spaces of the institution. This research aims at providing a methodology for general characterization of regionally oriented higher education institutions in terms of their location within urban systems, as well as exploring the spatial organization of the interior of the institutions analyzed.
Highlights
In the late 1950s, Higher Education (HE) began expanding, giving rise to a process later known as “massification” [1]
The analysis shows that the polytechnic institutions examined present low values of integration which means they have a low potential of becoming to-destinations within their hosting cities
Despite the fact that this feature enhances the precincts visibility, the Polytechnic Institutions scoped in this paper are still limited by their spatial configuration in terms of promoting serendipitous encounters when it comes to academic-external community relationships, since spatial configuration plays key role in enabling and promoting encounter and social interaction [30,32,48]
Summary
In the late 1950s, Higher Education (HE) began expanding, giving rise to a process later known as “massification” [1]. Growth in student numbers was not at first accompanied by democratization and modernization of HE, except in a very particular sense, namely, the opening up of access to a wider social spectrum. This was certainly the explicit aim of education policy, but it did not entail immediate changes in the internal structure and governance of universities. Different fields of teaching and research emerged which, in turn, drew in more and different types of students: more first-generation students, older students, mostly employed, and those entering HE on the basis of skills acquired in the labor market [2]
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