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THE PROBLEM STATEMENT

With his first important commission the "Fun Palace" in 1961, British architect Cedric Price, with Joan Littlewood, suggested that spectacle and entertainment could serve to educate metropolitans benefitting from the presence of many luminaries visiting the city at any given time. His later project "Potteries Thinkbelt" proposed to redevelop disused rail tracks of a dis-industrialized landscape into a mobile university touring the whole country using a network of classrooms and laboratories built from the train carriages.

These two projects question the different roles that a university campus can have in the contemporary city. For example, the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London occupies three row houses on Bedford Square and is part of a neighbourhood in which a number of large architecture/engineering firms such as Ove Arup are established. Both the location of the school in the city and its program, facilitate exchanges with the firms while students develop their projects. The idea there is that the compact city is in itself a theatre of education. It is said that, in attending a university, it is not so much what one learns but whom one meets there.

At the same time, our higher educational system is undergoing major changes as free-access educational sources are now rooted in television channels, and prestigious North American universities have started offering online curriculums. These changes reintroduce Cedric Price's ideas as more than just a possible utopia. In addition, the space available for inner-city campuses being limited, we turn to brown field sites that are often landlocked, as we see in the proposed redevelopment of the Université de Montréal new campus, to be built on former railway yards. Such sites need to be studied in order to re-link them with surrounding downtown neighbourhoods.


THE CHALLENGE

Fields of knowledge: Towards a University of the streets invites young designers to think about the relationship between the university campus and the city in light of contemporary ways of living and especially of the movement of information through relationships, political actions, and new educational contexts. Based on a critical approach, use your experience of the campus, to propose a closer social, environmental and educational relationship between the city and the campus.

To answer, you can select your own campus, or one of the seven other participant university’s:

Université de Montréal
McGill University
Université du Québec à Montréal
Concordia University
Université Laval
Carleton University
Ryerson University
University of Toronto.


KEY QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION

The Charrette raises the following questions:

  • The Latin etymology of the word "campus" refers to a physical field, a place where strategic spatial relationships are turned both inward towards the university milieu but also outwards to the city. "Campus" then refers to the relationship maintained by buildings surrounding a field - a non-exclusive public educational place in the city. What should be the relationship between campus and city centre today?

  • Can the campus function like a city in itself, much like the model of UQAM in Montreal or Ryerson and Toronto universities with their close relationship with the urban centre?

  • With the emergence of new modes of teaching (online universities) how do we express these changes and what is the correct urban representation of a knowledge-based society?

  • With the emergence of new modes of social, political and cultural interactions in the city, how can we express the role of the university as a key node within this changing landscape?

  • Today, the scope of a university extends beyond the local and spatial boundaries of the campus to reach a much wider network of relationships both physical, social, intellectual, and virtual. What would be an architectural vision of these new fields of action?

  • Multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary are all terms that refer to new approaches to academic knowledge. How have these terms transformed our perception of the expression and structure of the university?

  • Flexibility, adaptability, and versatility of academic programs, so as to reach as many people possible, are and will be more important in order to meet new demographic contexts, especially in North America. The physical anchorage of knowledge sharing faces a challenge that exceeds the dichotomy of centre and periphery in the contemporary city. How should we define this anchor?

  • The promotion of research at all levels of university structures requires a strong relationship forged between researchers, the broad academic community and students, how could this lead to a tightly woven linkage between research Groups and the city?

  • How can we use the presence of the university campus project to improve the quality of life for the citizens of the city? The recent Field Operations projects for a green "knowledge" corridor, connecting strategic locations in the cities, with the campus’s of San Juan, Puerto Rico and Syracuse NY, seem to be good examples here of the « two way street » of campus and city.

  • How can one requalify the edges of a campus with its city neighbourhoods? For example would it be positive to build public places as «social connecters» to the surrounding neighbourhoods?


REFERENCES

Campus Locations

Websites