Creating a Sense of Community on Urban College and University Campuses
Implications for Planning and Design
by Peter Bacevice and Bennet DunkleyUrban campuses have unique planning and design challenges when it comes to creating a sense of place that reflects both their global ambitions and local commitments to a variety of stakeholders.
The urban college and university campus is a unique institutional form. It is more than just an academic institution in a city setting; it is a unique spatial typology characterized by a mix of planning and design elements that incorporate features from learning environments, workplaces, public spaces, R&D centers, living spaces, and cultural spaces (Haar 2010). Large cities provide colleges and universities located within their boundaries a dynamic place in which to situate curricular experiences. For these institutions, a city is not just a context to study, but rather a cause to engage and shape.
For these institutions, a city is not just a context to study, but rather a cause to engage and shape.
Urban campuses are firmly embedded in their surrounding communities, and they anchor these settings in various ways. Unlike a college town or suburban campus where a college or university is often the sole dominant institution, urban campuses exist alongside many other institutions, organizations, neighborhoods, and people who more often than not are unaffiliated with the college or university environment but nevertheless impacted by its planning decisions. Some urban campuses exist behind gates, walls, or other clearly delineated boundaries, even when they are otherwise part of or adjacent to the urban street grid. These boundaries can perform various functions related to campus security, traffic flow, and general pedestrian access. Several New York City campuses like Fordham University
and Brooklyn College have security checkpoints that control general access to the campus grounds, while the boundaries of other urban campuses like Loyola University’s Lake Shore campus in Chicago are more permeable. Still other urban campuses are spread throughout neighborhoods in ways that mix urban life and campus life in shared settings where the boundaries between neighborhood and academic space blur. The layering of New York University, the New School, and New York City’s Greenwich Village neighborhood within the Manhattan street grid epitomizes this typology. Finally, some urban campuses exist as neighborhoods unto themselves or as part of campus districts that are more removed from the residential and commercial centers of neighboring communities. Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland’s University Circle district is part of a multi-institutional setting shared with the Cleveland Institute of Art, the Cleveland Institute of Music, a cluster of museums and other cultural institutions, the Cleveland Clinic, and University Hospitals of Cleveland.
College and university leaders are increasingly aware of the need to engage local communities as they grow and shape their campuses. Beginning in the mid-20th century, urban colleges and universities played a role in shaping neighborhoods in many large American cities as institutional participants in urban renewal programs. While urban renewal policy has faced its share of critics for its “bulldozer approach” to city planning (Carmon 1999), efforts in the
latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st have turned their attention to economic development and neighborhoodlevel engagement. Consequently, urban campuses today are cognizant of their role as stewards of city land and neighborhood space. In many cases, institutions now take a more surgical approach to campus planning. However, when opportunities arise for larger-scale land-use change and institution building, the legacy of earlier generations of land-use policy compels urban campuses to tread lightly and engage stakeholders as caring citizens.
Learning, research, and the practice of scholarship are community endeavors. Communities often self-generate and self-sustain social and professional bonds through which shared goals are achieved. Colleges and universities nurture a range of communities within their institutional structures.
The impetus for urban campuses to create a sense of community through their physical presence in cities should begin with some key questions. The first is who are the communities we are serving? For urban campuses (and, arguably, for many larger colleges and universities regardless of location), the answer is often a mix of local, state, national, and global stakeholders. On the one hand, urban campuses engage with local and state-level stakeholders through the visible impact of the institution’s teaching and research on dense populations of people in close geographic proximity to those activities. On the other, the social, economic, and political capital that stems from national and international collaborations brings prestige that raises the profile of the institution and the local campus environment. Additionally, the decades-long decline in state and local funding for higher education has necessitated broader engagement with a range of potential global funding sources. In other words, institutional prestige, legitimacy, and funding for many urban campuses are a function of the institution’s global reputation, but an urban campus’s institutional impact is widely experienced at the most local scale.
The way an urban college or university answers this first question will impact macro-level planning decisions. These include the development of master-plan strategies and landuse strategies, the formation of institutional partnerships, and the decisions made concerning academic programs and how they engage with the institution’s various stakeholders in alignment with the broader campus mission.
The second key question is how are we serving our stakeholders? Once institutional leaders articulate who they need to serve at local, state, national, and international levels, then decisions about the planning and design of the campus environment come into play. The way an urban college or university answers this second question will impact microlevel planning decisions. These include the programming of campus spaces, the provision of access to spaces for institutional participants and guests, the development of service/UX design elements, and the sharing of institutional space with other partners or organizational entities.
Based on how university leaders address the questions posed above, the following planning and design strategies may be considered:
» Consider shared amenities or services with other institutions. The density that often defines urban campuses can lessen the supply of available real estate and raise its costs. However, this same density also brings opportunities to share amenities and services. The Auraria Higher Education Center (2018) in Denver is a notable example of a public organization that manages the real estate and shared services for three state universities located in close geographic proximity in the city’s center. On a smaller scale, the University Center (n.d.) in Chicago is a university residential development that provides campus housing for students at Columbia College Chicago, Roosevelt University, and DePaul University in a single facility. Public-private partnerships among universities, developers, landlords, public agencies, and/or public benefit corporations
can be structured in ways that establish shared responsibilities for the funding, design, construction, and ongoing maintenance of such jointly operated facilities.
» Create publicly approachable space, and consider how people access it. Urban campuses are often located in areas of heavy pedestrian and vehicular traffic—some of which may be strategically diverted around or through the campus in order to manage access to it. Some urban campuses occupy otherwise highly prominent “postcard locations” of either cultural significance, neighborhood prominence, or architectural prestige. Whatever functions occupy a given campus building, it is safe to assume that more people will pass by the space compared to a similar suburban or small-town campus building. This is especially true for places like business incubators, art galleries, and cultural spaces, which are meant to attract visitors or users from collaborating institutions. Some of the newest urban campuses like Cornell Tech (2018) in New York City are designing showcase buildings and public spaces that depart from traditional campus planning norms and, in doing so, invite critical reflection on the future of higher education.
» Leverage the landscape. There are a number of ways urban campuses can integrate within the grid or layout of the cities in which they are located. The use of natural or naturalistic elements to define the campus and signal approachability is a way for urban campuses to create a sense of place (Way 2016). At the University of Washington’s West Campus in Seattle, large elm trees define a plaza and residential space on the campus, which includes publicly accessible connector plazas integrated with the street grid (van Huygen 2018).
» Support local housing policy. In some cities and neighborhoods, urban academic campuses are catalysts for economic and civic revitalization. In several Rust Belt cities such as Buffalo (Andrei 2015), Detroit
(Wayne State University 2018), and Cleveland (Greater Circle Living 2017), local universities—in partnership with other major employers—fund various incentive programs to encourage employees to purchase and live in homes in nearby neighborhoods. These programs are often structured in the form of home purchase assistance, loan incentives, or home renovation funds. Campus support of local housing development also helps align a university’s economic interests with other mission-driven interests such as social justice, affordable housing support, and sustainable development. Even though local housing is most often separate from a university’s space portfolio and beyond official campus boundaries, an institution’s support of local housing development can create a bridge from the campus to neighboring business districts or institutions. In essence, it is a way for an institution to contribute to broader master planning initiatives and community development.
» Move back-of-house functions off the grid. Many urban campuses in very large and dense cities like New York and Chicago face limited options for the location of various functions. But this constraint can also provide opportunities. Because of the sizable commercial real estate markets in those cities, urban campuses often have more options for leasing space than they would if they were located in smaller markets. By prioritizing central campus spaces for academic functions related to teaching, research, business engagement, and housing, urban campuses can relocate non-academic functions such as financial operations and other back-of-house activities to leased space elsewhere in the city. In fact, this strategy can create adjacencies to other partner organizations that may provide benefits to these backof-house functions that they might not otherwise enjoy if they were embedded within academic space.
These are just a few examples of planning and design strategies that urban campuses can use to shape both their
respective institutions and the neighboring communities of which they are a part. Through the use of these and other strategies, urban colleges and universities can establish new norms around responsible development, sustainable land use, user-centric design, and equitable allocation of real estate resources. Collectively, the implementation of such strategies contributes to an archetypal 21st-century experiential learning environment that can amplify an institution’s global prestige and intellectual authority while positively nurturing its local roots in the hearts and minds of the community.
Urban colleges and universities can establish new norms around responsible development, sustainable land use, user-centric design, and equitable allocation of real estate resources.
REFERENCES
Andrei, M. 2015. UB Launches H.O.M.E. Loan Program. UBNow, November 20. Accessed November 19, 2018: www.buffalo.edu/ubnow/ stories/2015/11/home.html
Auraria Higher Education Center. 2018. Home page. Accessed November 19, 2018: https://www.ahec.edu/.
Carmon, N. 1999. Three Generations of Urban Renewal Policies: Analysis and Policy Implications. Geoforum 30 (2): 145–58. Accessed November 19, 2018: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/ S0016718599000123.
Cornell Tech. 2018. Home page. Accessed November 19, 2018: https:// tech.cornell.edu/.
Greater Circle Living. 2017. Home page. Accessed November 19, 2018: https://greatercircleliving.org/
Haar, S. 2010. The City as Campus: Urbanism and Higher Education in Chicago. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
University Center. n.d. Home page. Accessed November 19, 2018: www. universitycenter.com/university-center-chicago-illinois/
van Huygen, M. 2018. Downtown Seattle Is Full of Private-Public Spaces. Curbed Seattle, January 29. Accessed November 19, 2018: https://seattle.curbed.com/maps/downtown-seattle-private-publicspaces.
Way, T. 2016. The Urban University’s Hybrid Campus. Journal of Landscape Architecture 11 (1): 42–55.
Wayne State University. 2018. Office of Economic Development: Live Midtown. Accessed November 19, 2018: http://economicdevelopment. wayne.edu/live-midtown.php.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES
PETER BACEVICE, PH.D ., is director of research at HLW and a research associate with the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. He is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
BENNET DUNKLEY, AIA, is a principal at HLW who leads the firm’s higher education practice. He is based in New York City.