Spatializing the Knowledge Economy: The Campus as a Discursive Project, Parallel Project, and More-than-Institutional Project
AlBader, Bader
2023
Abstract
In contrast to the normative scholarly and professional expectation that the university’s spatialization be tightly coupled with its institutional purposes and prerogatives, this dissertation posits that the institution and the campus may purposively be loosely coupled. Employing a multimodal research design that incorporates interpretive, historiographical, and qualitative strategies to bear upon textual, visual, and spatial data, this dissertation can be understood as a multipronged study that nuances the campus-institution relationship and challenges a straightforward indexicality between them. Guided by this overarching objective, this dissertation comprises three distinct core chapters, each with its own focus under the larger umbrella of the campus-institution nexus. This set of approaches allows me to parse both the conceptual context of higher educational spatialization as well as specific instances of this spatialization at the intersection of the institutional, the national, and the global. The first core chapter takes up the campus as a discursive project, surveying the range of campus planning and design monographs to trace the ways in which scholars, practitioners, and other authors have written the campus into existence as a spatial concept, rather than an institutional metaphor. Showing that variant understandings of the campus’ orientation towards its institution animate this discursive production, this chapter posits what might be called ‘the discursive campus’ as a conceptual assemblage of these different epistemic logics. The second core chapter elucidates the relationship between institutional and spatial form during the rapid founding of an elite graduate research institution, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), in Saudi Arabia, a wealthy absolute monarchy. This context – where both the institution and the campus started out as blank canvases for founders to aspirationally shape – shows that their formation were parallel projects, with the campus project ultimately serving as a Saudi-based anchor for the globally-oriented institutional project. The third core chapter focuses on the masterplans of Sabah Al-Salem University City (SSUC), a new campus for a preexisting but spatially-fragmented public university in Kuwait, a parliamentary emirate. Here, campus design had to contend with institutional and contextual pressures, such as the need for additional space and to heed a new segregation-of-the-sexes law; this chapter shows how two successive masterplans in turn engaged and addressed concerns much broader than the institution’s. Though ostensibly products of specific campus design commissions, these masterplans constituted more-than-institutional documents. These three core chapters substantiate my affirmation of the viability of a discursive and designerly understanding of the campus that is not in lockstep with the university institution. This examination of the discourse alongside two projects in relatively understudied Gulf countries demonstrates that the planning and design of campuses entail much more than simply responding to given institutional data and desiderata. Campus projects are means of working through a broader cacophony of desires, and serve as records of their management, reconciliation, or obfuscation.Deep Blue DOI
Subjects
campus planning and design contemporary spaces, discourses, and politics of higher education organizational studies Arabian Gulf countries Middle Eastern nation building and city making legislative, constitutional, monarchical, social, and urban regimes
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