Engaging Universities as Partners and Proponents of the New Urban Agenda: Coordination, Spatial Strategies, Access

Research Brief for UN-Habitat UNI and the UN-Habitat Working Group on Higher Education for Sustainability

Real Existing Regionalism: The Region Between Talk, Territory and Technology

In this essay, we propose the notion of real existing ‘lived’ regionalism as a rejoinder to the normative and ideological debates around new regionalism. Regional forms have shown little convergence in this age of globalized regionalization. Instead of an ideational construct or set of predictable practices, we argue that regionalism is a contested product of discourses (talk), territorial relationships (territory) and technologies (material and of power). The concept of real existing regionalism confronts the tensions between the discursive constructions and normative interventions characterizing much current regionalist debate and the territorial politics and technologies reflecting, generating and directing new state spatial strategic choices. The essay demonstrates the utility of the real existing regionalism framework through an analysis of the greenbelt, transport planning and postsuburbanization in Southern Ontario. We argue that regulatory institutions capture the Toronto region in a mix of rhetorical and technological change that complies with neither preconceived notions of regionalization nor the pessimism of total regional dysfunctionality. Rather, the lived experience of regionalization illuminates the emergent assemblages, multiplicity of everyday flows and ongoing multiscalar negotiations of diverse communities that produce the real existing region

Beyond town and gown: Universities, territoriality and the mobilization of new urban structures in Canada

Cities and universities have been active participants in the creation of new economic structures, but the sociospatial relationships between ‘town’ and ‘gown’, and the potential impact of deepening and diversifying the relationship on either side, are neither fully understood nor simple. In this paper, we focus on universities in Canada to provide an integrative review of the changing sociospatial relations of cities and universities in an era of increasing neoliberal and globalized development agendas. We treat these relationships in spatial and institutional terms, recognizing that actors and decision-makers in government and academic bodies understand their links as a combination of both. Our analysis destabilizes established normative understandings regarding the sociospatial structure and governance of the university and the interrelations between universities and urban space. Numerous spatial strategies demonstrate that universities' relations are multi-layered, multi-scaled and multiply topological. Yet while they may be well positioned to adopt a proactive role in shaping economic development and civic agendas, universities have no privileged position in their communities. Despite acting as deliberate place-making agents in rapidly changing metropolitan environments, universities remain located in, yet apart from, their urban and regional context

Rent Gap

The rent gap refers to the difference between the capitalized rent realized from a plot of land and the potential rent possible if it were developed to its “highest and best” use. Introduced by Neil Smith in 1979, the rent gap provides a systematic production‐side theory of urban rent and inner‐city transformation. The concept has been critiqued, however, for dismissing the role of individual agents and consumption preferences in explanatory accounts of gentrification