The limits of university regionalism

Abstract

ABSTRACT As producers of urban knowledge and urbanizing actors in their own right, universities play a vital role in identifying the projects, processes, and agents involved in constructing the “region in itself”. While academic and urban leaders in cities with one or two universities can open dialogues about citywide collaborations, such strategies are significantly more complex when scaled to extended global metropolises where provosts and presidents must vie for attention in a crowded governance arena. This paper critically examines universities’ ability to, and strategic interest in, facilitating the process of metropolisation: leveraging city-regional spatial imaginaries to transcend parochial territorial interests and generate modes of urbanization and collective action constitutive of a “region for itself”. An empirical analysis of the New York metropolitan area highlights the spatial contradictions and political tensions unfurling as universities create new (post-)metropolitan identities and inform decision-making at various scales, the limits of university regionalism.