Elsevier

Cities

Volume 88, May 2019, Pages 252-260
Cities

Perspectives on the 21st Century Urban University from Singapore – A viewpoint forum

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2018.11.006Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Synergies between city and state policy strategically position Singapore as a laboratory for urban analysis, engagement, and experimentation.

  • Governmental remits tend to shape externally-facing university activities rather than internal institutional drivers.

  • De-anchoring the global city from the nation presents distinct opportunities through which Singaporean universities pursue reframed and rescaled interests.

  • The 21st-century Singaporean urban university is founded upon, and internalizes, a particular urban ontology.

Abstract

In this Cities viewpoint forum, we argue that there is a need to rethink U.S./U.K.-centric approaches to the urban university in policy and practice. Gathering three critical commentaries by practitioners from within the Singaporean higher education system, the forum responds to the challenges of: (1) broadened expectation placed on higher education institutions; (2) the pressures and possibilities of global urbanization; and (3) the provocation to theorize the urban, and thus the urban university, from beyond the ‘Global North’. Following an introduction detailing the history and relevance of the Singaporean case, the three viewpoints seek to illustrate the various dimensions of university urbanism in the ‘Lion City’. Each address what the idea of being an urban university means, and how it is operationalized in Singapore. Key policy and conceptual insights illuminate a higher education regime negotiating the tensions between national developmentalist agendas and the opportunities opened by global urban connectivity. Significantly, and in contrast to current urban university paradigms, we find Singapore's university sector internalizing and operating with a particular technocratic urban ontology that, while partial, helps collapses the distinction between universities being ‘in’, ‘of’, or ‘for’ the city and opens new avenues to analyze and mobilize universities in urban(izing) society.

Section snippets

Introduction to the forum

Jean-Paul D. Addie and Michele Acuto

Singapore and the milieu of the new global urban university

K.C. Ho

Is the academic experience, its social life, and university mission likely to be distinctive when the university is located in a city-state which is at the same time a global city?

My graduate student has just returned from a short field trip to a neighboring country and we were discussing plans for the longer term stay when he remarked that one of the first comments people he met there was the recognition of his Egyptian heritage once they found out his name. We talked about how strange

Building a global urban university in Singapore5

Stephen Cairns

The ETH Zürich Future Cities Laboratory (FCL) operates in an unusual institutional framework. We are here at the invitation of the Singaporean government: FCL was established in 2010 by ETH Zürich and Singapore's National Research Foundation (NRF) as part of the CREATE campus, which brings together a range of overseas universities – M.I.T., Berkeley, and Cambridge – to work with Singapore-based institutions on once-renewable five-year research contracts. In practice, we are

The urban university at work: Tackling urban ageing in Singapore5

Hwee Pink Tan

There is a blurry line between the national agenda and the urban agenda in Singapore. This not only makes the city-state quite unique, but is reflected in the origins and work of the iCity Lab at Singapore Management University (SMU). The iCity Lab came about because Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) – a global IT consulting and services company – wanted to partner with SMU to leverage our strengths in integrating computing, management, and social science. Working with us to build

Reloading the urban university from Singapore

Jean-Paul D. Addie and Michele Acuto

The preceding viewpoints illustrate the challenges and opportunities opened by university urbanism in Singapore. There are certainly several commonalities with the internal restructuring, drive for societal ‘impact’, and globally-competitive orientations being pursued by universities in the Global North. As with many North American and European universities, establishing policies and mechanisms promoting interdisciplinary research are increasingly central

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    This work was supported by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement number 657522.

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