Abstract
The shift in focus in UK higher education since Thatcherism from the production of knowledge for civic betterment to the production and consumption of knowledge by the university for revenue generation can be read through the social rearrangement of space in the university town or city. A key spatial reconfiguration emerging from the shift in economic conditions is the collapse of the modern university as a singular, ideological construct. Like ‘the city’ before it, the modern university has, at its interior, been reformed into a newly defined, fragmented public–private social space, and, at its exterior, into a devourer of the space of the local community. This article showcases excerpts from a film made by the authors entitled The Death and Life of UK Universities – a title inspired by Jane Jacobs’s critique of great American cities. Our film is a cinematic database survey of the changing space of all British universities which considers this systematic spatial reprogramming of space within the city. The two-year research project is an audio-visual critique of the way in which neoliberalism, corporatization and commercial interests have co-opted the space of the British university. Referencing the films of Charlie Chaplin and Gordon Matta-Clark and the writings of Henri Lefebvre, the film focuses on university cities, critically observing the rise of university marketing material and the consumption of the city and of local community life for university student accommodation. We ask: How are UK universities being spatially reconfigured and what are the consequences?
Highlights
Academic Capitalism and the Neoliberal CityBetween 1962 and 1998, full-time university students who were ‘ordinary residents’ in the United Kingdom paid no tuition fees
Unlike most existing twenty-first-century research on universities, which records architectures and campus or estates planning,[6] or which endeavours to reinstate the value of university placemaking7) to showcase, sell and promote current trends in the university campus experience, this research is original because it is framed as a spatial critique of processes associated with academic capitalism
It aims to showcase an urban collage of social, cultural and material waste and excess associated with much UK university campus development, resulting from the neoliberal requirements to be contingent, resilient, flexible and all the other catchphrases that underpin ‘liquid modernity’[8] for individual, institutional and governmental growth
Summary
Between 1962 and 1998, full-time university students who were ‘ordinary residents’ in the United Kingdom paid no tuition fees. Unlike most existing twenty-first-century research on universities, which records architectures and campus or estates planning,[6] or which endeavours to reinstate the value of university placemaking7) to showcase, sell and promote current trends in the university campus experience, this research is original because it is framed as a spatial critique of processes associated with academic capitalism It aims to showcase an urban collage of social, cultural and material waste and excess associated with much UK university campus development, resulting from the neoliberal requirements to be contingent, resilient, flexible and all the other catchphrases that underpin ‘liquid modernity’[8] for individual, institutional and governmental growth. Using a research-led film-making methodology, this article asks, how have universities in the UK been spatially reconfigured under neoliberalism? And how has the rapid morphosis of their spatial reconfiguration influenced the city and society in which they are located today?
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