The University As Urban Question: State, Capital, and the Commons In East Asia and Beyond

In urban studies, the university rarely figures as a problem in itself, instead appearing as an anchor institution, a growth-machine partner, or an agent of gentrification. This session reads the campus instead as a spatial formation in which land and rent are inseparable from the production of knowledge, conduct, and subjects. We ask, after Lefebvre, how a single site organises capital, governs conduct, yet remains open to appropriation from below.

The East Asian experience resists tidy genealogies: the colonial university was never the colonial state's work alone, its origins entangling missionaries, a private landed class, and a politics of land, capital, and class. Never reducible to a single project, the campus has exceeded its functions, harbouring the undercommons and "living knowledge", and staging movements that rewrite the city.

That settlement is unravelling. Under marketisation, the university becomes an agent of urban redevelopment while remaking itself in the firm's image: autonomous spaces enclosed by metrics, academic labour precaritized, students interpellated as consumers and debtors, producing an anxious subject compelled to commodify itself without end. The contest runs from buildings into the texture of everyday life.

We welcome critical, comparative, and ethnographic submissions on:

• The university as a spatial project of nation-building and colonial rule
• Postcolonial knowledge production and spatial politics
• The undercommons, the commons, and autonomous educational experiments on campus
• The campus as a base for social movements and the politics of autonomous space
• University-led gentrification, studentification, and the campus in urban redevelopment
• Critical and ethnographic analyses of campus space