Learning Spaces as Social Capital

The premise of this chapter is that space (and place: which I define here as what people make of the space they inhabit) is an under-acknowledged independent variable in understanding how higher education institutions work. Space in the university takes the form it does as a result of the decisions and actions of its designers, its users, those who manage it in various ways, and those who look after it. But may there also be a sense in which space and place help to determine what the university is? As Hillier and Hanson (1984, p. 2) argue, ‘the ordering of space in buildings is really about the ordering of relations between people’