Institute For The Future

New Urbanism and the college

The New York Times has an article about a trend among universities and colleges to invest in New Urbanism-style town development, as a way to create an environment more attractive to students, faculty, and others. Of course, large urban universities have been in the real estate development business for years (Stanford has been remarkably successful playing this market); what seems to be new is that a wider variety of institutions-- from Hendrix College in Arkansas, to Furman Univeristy in South Carolina, to Hampshire College in Massachusetts-- are getting into the game, and they're doing so mainly to make themselves more attractive to students, faculty, and others who want urban cultural amenities.

 

Nearly all of these developments are being built by institutions with vast tracts of unused land; officials hope to take advantage of that asset to help build endowments. Generally, these are also institutions that are not looking to expand significantly the size of their student bodies....

[O]fficials have realized that a more urbanized version of the ideal campus could attract a population well past its college years — working people and retiring baby boomers — if there is housing to suit them. And so a new concept of the college campus is taking root: a small city in the country that is not reserved for only the young.

 

In effect, this is a collegiate version of what Anthony Townsend and I have been studying: attempts by partnerships of universities, real estate developers, and local governments to create innovation zones that will attract world-class scientists, entrepreneurs, corporations, and start-ups.

This is a similar phenomenon, but at a different financial scale, and with a different audience in mind: not the VC-funded biotech hotshot willing to locate her company in any of half a dozen countries, but professionals, retirees, and working-class people looking to strike a balance between small-town affordability and intimacy, and academic/urban engagement.

Indeed, it sounds less like these developments don't aim to be interesting small towns, on the model of Williamstown or Amherst; they want to be urban neighborhoods, without the big city.

 

Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., which has created several programs to revive adjacent neighborhoods and to encourage faculty to live nearby, is building an apartment complex for undergraduates across from the main entrance to campus. There will be retail stores on the first floor.

“I think liberal arts colleges and universities are all about the serendipitous moments,” said John Fry, president of Franklin & Marshall. “You’re in the coffee shop on a Saturday morning sipping a cup of coffee and you run into a professor, and two hours later you’ve had one of those transformative moments.”

 

With some modification, this quote, and the idea of constructing an urban space that encourages serendipity and casual transformation that it expresses, could appear in a conversation about Bio-X, the Stata Center, the new IT-media region in Copenhagen, or any number of other new R&D spaces. In this case, the "transformative moment" probably leads to a deeper appreciation of the mind-body problem or the influence of Kurosawa on contemporary cinema, not a patent for a new kind of drug delivery system; but the underlying logic is the same.