New Campuses for New Communities: The University and Exurbia [Research and Debate]

New Campuses for New Communities: The University and Exurbia Richard Bender and John Parman Universities and colleges can be great forces for urbanity in their communities (and vice versa). Just how this poten- tial is integrated into a community, however, has been the subject of various interpretations through history. Today, in America, there is a tendency to think that the university campus must be a place apart. Likewise, on campus, there is a tendency among university administrators to think that every new academic or institutional “need” must be trans- lated into a new building campaign. There are other options. While models like Jefferson’s University of Virginia and venerable Ivy League campuses still shape our sense of an appropriate setting for academic life, an even older root — going back to Bologna, Padua and Paris — situates the academy within the polis and makes it an integral part of everyday life. The urbanity of this model reflects the historic tendency of towns and cities to mix uses in a fine-grained way that creates and enlivens cul- ture as well as stimulates the local economy. For many such institutions a more intensive mix of uses may also reflect financial necessity, leading them to seek partners in their communities with whom to integrate facilities. The need for alternatives to a territorial, facilities-ori- ented approach to campus planning were brought home to us in the late 1990s with the financial collapse of the American Center in Paris. Following the completion of a magnificent building designed by Frank Gehry, its director publicly reflected on how he had thought he was building a $40-million asset, when in fact he had built a $6 million-a- year liability. Universities have learned from their own past to the extent that they are developing more flexible buildings today, and often forming new partnerships to share the cost with others, including developers. Urban universities are also increasingly looking beyond their own campus boundaries to grow. Arizona State University, for example, is expanding across metropolitan Phoenix, while Har- vard is shifting its science and technology faculties to a new campus across the Charles River. Bard College has established a study and research center in Manhattan, just as ASU, with its main campus in Tempe, is moving into downtown Phoenix. All of these developments point to a recognition that these institutions realize their futures lie at least partly in looking beyond traditional campus bound- aries, integrating university programs with those of the city at large. Such a rethinking of seemingly fundamental tenets of American campus design are particularly relevant today as “learning” becomes a lifelong, year-round pursuit. Post- secondary education is now a necessary accompaniment of adult life, enabling people to ramp up skills, get needed credentials, and finally move from work to the rest of life. Given this, the idea of building a traditional university or college campus may be more and more of a distraction from what real investment in higher education is coming to mean. The Rise of Exurbia A rethinking of what a campus is may prove especially beneficial in “exurbia.” This is the name recently given to sprawling new communities like Mesa, Arizona, that are frequently home to as many people as older cities like St. Louis. Such locales evince all the forms of the twentieth- century American suburbs, but without any sense of being tied to an original center. They are a logical next step from what Joel Kotkin and others have noted about U.S. demog- raphy: that since 1960, more than 90 percent of all popu- lation growth in America’s metropolitan areas has taken place in suburbia. 1 Another social critic, David Brooks, attributes the right- ward shift in American politics to exurbia, which he con- tends in not simply an “opting out” of the city, but also a more utopian impulse to reinvent the city, in the tradition of new towns from Ebenezer Howard on forward. 2 Exurbia may only be passing through a suburban stage on the way to becoming a new metropolis. But universities and colleges may contribute to this transition by helping to give it much-needed cultural and civic life. Missed Opportunity Despite the potential benefits that a rethinking of the relation between campus and city might entail, most large university systems continue to build according to old models. A good example is the construction of a tenth campus of the University of California, now underway in Merced. Merced is one of a chain of towns and small cities extending south from Sacramento to Bakersfield in the state’s vast Central Valley. This formerly agricultural area is today developing according to the classic exurban scenario, and all indications are that it will become Califor- nia’s third megalopolis by 2050. As a result of this growth, the population of formerly sleepy Merced is expected to rise to 200,000 in the next forty years. As the setting for a new urban agglomeration, the Cen- tral Valley has several things going for it. Older patterns of infrastructure and commerce already link its towns with a major highway (California 99) and several north-south rail lines — one of which the state may rebuild to accommodate high-speed passenger service. Furthermore, its older town centers, largely developed in the early twentieth century, offer attractive grids of tree-lined residential streets and tidy, if underutilized commercial cores. However, instead Bender and Parman / New Campuses for New Communities