Kowloon Walled Dormitory, Summer's Over, & More
Around the College Towns: Links and commentary related to urbanism and higher ed for the week of Aug. 30 - Sept. 9.
Note: Around the College Town is my weekly links roundup article on urbanism and education. This weekly post mostly covers news that may have fallen through the cracks rather than the big events.
Hong Kong Dorm Drama
I was quoted this week in a University World News article on student housing concerns in Hong Kong. Basically, universities there are struggling with finding enough housing for their students (a familiar problem around the globe). I wanted to highlight and expound on some of these issues here on College Towns.
Hong Kong, especially the old Kowloon Walled City, holds a kind of mythical status in urbanism discourse. I think most urbanists are at least somewhat fascinated by the sheer impossibility of its urban form. The city has come to inspire broader imaginations and define aesthetics in genres like cyberpunk.
Conversely, the conditions in Hong Kong are generally what NIMBYs think a duplex will do to their neighborhood. Images from the tiny East Asian city are nightmare porn for Nextdoor complaint threads. Some suburban Americans hear a proposal for a new apartment complex and imagine Kowloon Walled City.
Myself, I love Hong Kong. It is one of my favorite cities on the planet. The urban form is just so unique and alluring. That being said, it is one place where I think many Americans would feel quite uncomfortable. With build-up everywhere due to land limitations, every space is tiny compared to US standards. I could understand how suburban, lawn-loving Americans might feel claustrophobic just existing in Hong Kong.
But there are still things that American cities, and even small towns, have in common with Hong Kong: town and gown tensions.
The universities there are wonderful places; the University of Hong Kong is one of the world’s top universities (an amazingly cool campus if you ever go visit). So they are, of course, expanding and growing. There just isn’t much room for them to grow in Hong Kong proper
This is not like the issue in a US college town where locals try to claim things are full because they don’t want a dorm on a dumpy parking lot. A lot of Hong Kong is legitimately full, especially around the universities. Skyscrapers surround the elevated HKU campus, which you need to take an elevator to get to anyway.
The constrictions mean that universities have been trying to buy up old properties like shuttered restaurants or schools for conversion to classrooms, dorms, or other educational uses. I have been to two conferences now where the events were held at an old annexed K-12 school instead of at the main campus. Like everywhere near a college, this expansion brings with it consternation from locals.
Complicating the situation further is that the universities have been expanding enrollment to Mainland Chinese students, who bring with them a different cultural and linguistic flavor to the city. It has been a broader concern beyond higher ed that Mainland China has been stamping out the unique characteristics of Hong Kong identity, so these things play out on the ground with the students.
The situation in Hong Kong illustrates that even when building to a maximum, there will still be conflict and discord. The town and gown dynamic doesn’t disappear in an Asian megacity. It is there just like with the neighbors living next to a leafy green SEC campus. While certainly unique, there are just trends and parallels to any college town.
Links I’m Reading This Week
Education
English universities approved to open in Greece. Who wouldn’t want to go study on the Aegean? I always wondered why Greece wasn’t a more popular study abroad destination.
In more European news, Edinburgh, Scotland, home to an over 400-year-old university, is considering banning Purpose-Built Student Housing (PBSH). I expect more battles like this as large corporations continue pushing into local student markets.
Likewise, a university in London has students and seniors (as in the elderly) living together in an intergenerational housing program. Given the aging population, this is an interesting model to watch.
Back in the US, CUNY agrees to buy a struggling Manhattan university campus. More expansion for the bigger schools.
Middlebury U is closing the Monterey campus. Apparently, the Vermont campus has some debt it wants to focus on, and the California branch campus had long posed financial challenges.
Georgetown U opens new apartment-style dorms (these seem to be a more popular trend for young people these days). They also kept an interesting local vernacular design!
A lot is always happening in California: Cabrillo College and UC Santa Cruz break ground on a joint student housing project. These kinds of university-community college projects are becoming a bit more common (at least here in California). It might be worth a future article on the trend.
UC Berkeley’s independent student-run co-op organization now boasts 1,200 students, 17 houses, and three apartment buildings. Housing students much cheaper than even on-campus dorms. Interesting model.
Speaking of Berkeley, the student housing complex on the site of People’s Park will officially be named after Judith E. Heumann, an alum who led the Disability Rights Movement.
Urbanism-ish
Abandoned school, empty since 2019, and becoming a sinkhole due to neglect set to become a nice townhouse community. Local Oceanside NIMBYs are, of course, horrified.
Co-living spaces are growing in popularity. These are often depicted as a type of dystopia, but I think it’s fine to have multiple different housing types. These are fine.
Dutch cities look to ban e-bikes. This could be another wedge issue that divides urbanists, since a lot of us are very pro-e-bike. I may have a future post on this looming divide.
Residents of Tucson, Arizona, protest a proposed massive Amazon data center in town. No one seems to want these things in their town. Or is this like housing, where only the loudest and most active voices show up?
Speaking of urbanism protests, Italians protest a proposed mega project that would bridge Sicily to mainland Italy.
Artist creates ‘Bland Castle’ project to raise awareness about all the boring buildings being built. Hear, hear!
Around Substack
Note: I also think it’s important to stay connected to the growing Substack community. Here are a few I am reading this week:
I’ve featured Andy Boenau at Urbanism Speakeasy a few times now here, but he just does yeoman’s work here in terms of the urbanist movement. This week, he has a list of online tools for all the so-called amateurbansim out there. Bookmark it. Very useful!
If you’re an armchair urbanist or moonlight as a community activist, you know how important it is to maximize your impact with limited time. I’ve been there, I’m still there, and I can help. There’s a treasure trove of free web tools online related to urbanism. I don’t know of anyone using all of these all the time, but I use some of these every week. Use these resources to demonstrate expertise in your amateurbanism work.
Paul Musgrave writes at Systematic Hatreds on his experience working at Georgetown University’s campus in Qatar, specifically about living in the country. As someone who has taught in Korea and always has my eye back abroad, he makes it enticing!
I like it here. I even like the weather, with the exception of about three weeks during summer. (I have some gripes about the air quality.) I like my institution; I particularly like the eagerness, dedication, seriousness, and variety of my students. (In one class of ten last year, we had, I believe, seven or eight different nationalities represented.)… Not only is it possible to do good academic work here, but good academic work gets done here. I expect that to accelerate over time.
Closing Time… Pitch an Article for the New Academic Year
It’s the start of a brand new academic year. The summer flew by, didn’t it? I will have some new articles and series grappling with issues in education for this new school year soon. It is an exciting (if fraught) time to be researching, writing, and thinking about education.
This summer, I was lucky enough to have some amazing guest writers on College Towns. I will continue this opportunity for College Towns as a publishing outlet. If you have some idea for an article that aligns with the theme and tone of College Towns, send me a DM here or an email at ryanmallen555 at gmail.com.
Maintaining an entire Substack is, admittedly, a lot of work. So this could be a good opportunity to test the waters without fully committing to running a full site. Plus, I am usually open to writing that doesn’t quite fit the mainstream outlets like Inside Higher Ed or the Chronicle. So if you have some weird or experimental ideas, I am open to a pitch.
Thanks for the shout out! Glad the article helped.
Your Substack is so interesting and useful! Wish I had thought of it. Thanks for your time & effort.