Living and Learning: the Campus Redefined

By FRANCES HALSBAND

Universities are spilling out of their campuses into the cities around them. While the seeds of this accelerating trend were evident during the last century, the latest developments are new conceptions of campus form, on a gigantic scale, with hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars committed to their construction. These new places challenge our ideas about campus life. But even if their planners can overcome the divisiveness in town-gown relations to get shovels in the ground, we must question if these will be real campuses, places that encourage interaction and exchange of ideas, or simply extensions of downtown as we know it.