‘Student Geographies’, Urban Restructuring, and the Expansion of Higher Education

Theorisations of urban restructuring illustrate a longstanding scholarly pursuit of the sociospatial manifestations of changing government policies (eg regional economic development, urban regeneration and planning, immigration). An exemplar here is Lees's (2008, page 2463) discussion of ` c̀osmetic policies'', social mixing, and geographies of urban renaissance. Within this context many studies have sought to disentangle the connectivity between the delivery of policies that invoke pronounced migration flows and emergent local population structures. The resultant, and often conspicuous, forms of urban transformation (eg housing) act as a stimulus for geographic scrutiny (often coupled to the seemingly symbiotic attention from the national media). Recently, this disciplinary convention has been epitomised, for example, by the literature on emerging sociospatialities of distinct subpopulations, such as A8 migrants (eg McDowell et al, 2009; Stenning and Dawley, 2009), transnational citizens (eg Ley and Kobayashi, 2005), and global supergentrifiers (Butler and Lees, 2006); mostly stimulated by new legislation and other structural conditions. Given this tendency, it is surprising that the marked increase of student populations and sociospatial concentrations of students have not been widely encapsulated in theories of urban restructuring, and how university towns are being reconstituted. The sociospatial impacts of state-induced, expanded systems of higher education since the 1990s, bound up with deeper structural transitions to knowledge-based economies and societies (see Watson, 2007), are paramount to understanding how, why, and where university towns and cities are being transformed. Yet, as Munro et al (2009) point out in this theme issue: `̀ there has been little attention paid to the spatial impacts of a mass HE [higher education] system'' (page1806), and there is the `̀ absence of academic or systematic policy attention paid to the impacts of the student population as a whole'' (page 1807). Accordingly, it is fair to say that theorisations of the effects of larger and more spatially concentrated student populations on different elements of urban systems, such as transport and communications, health services and dentists, retail, leisure, and business provision, housing and welfare, schools and nurseries, electoral voting, and community participation, are somewhat lacking. At the same time, it is unclear how enlarged student populations intersect with broader societal trends such as rising levels of population transience and density, mobile societies, social conflicts tied to lifestyle clashes, the disintegration of community cohesion and interaction, and decreasing expressions of social capital, detachment from local places, and lost senses of belonging. This begs the question: to what degree do rising clusters of student populations mediate wider unfolding societal trends, such as population transience and mobility, and social segregation? Arguably, it is possible that many of the preexisting conceptual tools and theoretical constructs of geography, urban sociology, and other disciplines are inadequate for resolving these issues, as well as other complex relationships between contemporary urban restructuring, student populations, and extended systems of higher education that are unravelling. Nevertheless, this is a worthwhile endeavour, since, as Van Den Berg and Russo (2004, page 1) stress, in their comparative study of nine European university towns: `̀ the relationship between universities and host communities is not limited to the institutional sphere. '' Guest editorial Environment and Planning A 2009, volume 41, pages 1795 ^ 1804