'Student geographies', urban restructuring, and the expansion of higher education

摘要

Theorisations of urban restructuring illustrate a longstanding scholarly pursuit of the sociospatial manifestations of changing government policies (eg regional economic development, urban regeneration and planning, immigration). An exemplar here is Lees's (2008, page 2463) discussion of "cosmetic policies", social mixing, and geographies of urban renaissance. Within this context many studies have sought to disentangle the connectivity between the delivery of policies that invoke pronounced migration flows and emergent local population structures. The resultant, and often conspicuous, forms of urban transformation (eg housing) act as a stimulus for geographic scrutiny (often coupled to the seemingly symbiotic attention from the national media). Recently, this disciplinary convention has been epitomised, for example, by the literature on emerging sociospatialities of distinct subpopulations, such as A8 migrants (eg McDowell et al, 2009; Stenning and Dawley, 2009), transnational citizens (eg Ley and Kobayashi, 2005), and global supergentrifiers (Butler and Lees, 2006); mostly stimulated by new legislation and other structural conditions.