Pedro MZILENI, Nelson Mandela University , South Africa
This paper presents studentification as a timeline of economic histories. These histories have shaped the city as the main host of colonialism and neoliberalism between the 19th and the 20th century. Part of this economic history has generated a higher education system that has also transitioned between different epochs of the city. The 21st century has featured a simultaneous converge of an unprecedented growth in higher education enrolments and also the ‘end of work’ through consistent deindustrialisation of the city’s manufacturing heritage. I argue that this city is imprisoned by major questions of this decade about the future of the urban landscape. As young people keep urbanising to the university city in massive scales to express their sociocultural mobility in these mobile times, the university city on the other hand is hosting them in a context where its historical geographies and local economies are struggling to transform away from their heritage of colonial industrialisation. A city trapped in colonial planning and in the neoliberal governance operations of the day has to find a new strange language in decolonial terms to comprehend studentification. Lefebvre’s Production of Space Theory helps me to make this case.
Mots clés : Deindustrialisation|Studentification |Lefebvre|Decolonial Theory
A105254MM