The Civic University and the City

Universities are quintessentially urban institutions and cannot avoid a relationship with the myriad of other institutions and communities that also inhabit the city, including local authorities responsible for the place in the round, businesses, and civil society.

The University and the public good • "We treat our opportunities to do research not as a public trust but as a reward for success in past studies" • "Rewards for research are deeply tied up with the production of academic hierarchy and the relative standing of institutions" BUT • "Public support for universities is based on the effort to educate citizens in general, to share knowledge, to distribute it as widely as possible in accord with publically articulated purposes" Calhoun , Thesis 11 (2006) The public value of the social sciences " Use of the adjective 'public' not only implies fundamental questions about accountability but also poses additional queries about to whom we as social scientists should feel accountable…Public social science has both a research and teaching agenda and involves a commitment to promote the public good through civic engagement" • The 'external' civic role of the university vis a vis 'internal' processes within the university and state higher education policies that shape these external relations

Sub-themes
• The university as an institution AND a set of academic sub-groups (a loosely coupled organisation) • The role of physical sites and regeneration projects in facilitating or inhibiting university economic and community engagement in the city • Inter institutional relationships between multiple universities and other HEIs especially in large cities • The inter-disciplinarity of many urban challenges and the institutional tension with existing disciplinary based academic structures (e.g sustainable or age friendly cities) • The role of intermediary organisations inside and outside of the university in linking the university and the city (e.g. TTOs/ science park organisations or on or off campus theatres, museums and art galleries) • The city and its various communities as collaborators or passive sources for academic research, teaching and knowledge exchange

Place and Community
• Expansion of HE in the 20 th Century an important dynamic in the physical development of citiesincluding new university cities • Suburbanisation of campuses and/or spatial fragmentation in large cities • The traditional campus as a 'semi-cloistered ' space in the midst of the city dedicated to meeting the work and leisure needs of student and academic communities • But more recent pressures to open out the campus to the city • University estate development practises reconciling the competing demands for teaching and research space and student accommodation with those of external communities • University use of the status of an embedded "anchor institution" to lever non-HE funding for capital projects

Universities as urban innovation actors
• Shift from mode 1 (linear) to mode 2 (co-production) knowledge creation and open innovation raises opportunities of relations with local actors from the city • Multi-faceted functions of the university as an educational and cultural institution not just a knowledge producer • Joining up direct commodification of knowledge via spin outs etc.
with human capital upgrades in the urban labour market and social capital that builds trust and co-operative norms in local economic governance networks • The "developmental" as well as "generative" role of universities • University influence on the city based political, institutional and network factors that shape innovation processes beyond input of knowledge capital 20

Social innovations as processes and outcomes
• "Social innovations are innovations that are social in both their ends and their means…new ideas (products, services and models) that simultaneously meet social needs (more effectively than alternatives) and create new social relationships or collaborations.
• The process of social interactions between individuals undertaken to reach certain outcomes is participative, involves a number of actors and stakeholders who have a vested interest in solving a social problem, and empowers the beneficiaries. It is in itself an outcome as it produces social capital" (BEPA, 2010: 9-10, italics added) The quadruple helix  The 'connected' city/region The civic university as a normative model?
• Not only excellent in terms of conventional academic criteria but also seeking to contribute to the public good. • Responsibility to society is not new, but given greater saliency as the challenges facing society heighten in intensity. • At the same time responding to the challenge of participating in a global higher education marketplace with its own internal logic in terms of competition for mobile students and academic staff • Managing the tensions between the demands from within and without higher education, including embedding external engagement into the internal process of managing the teaching and research undertaken by academic staff. • Managing conflicting signals in the external policy environment, not least in terms of the degree of focus of national governments on the global higher education marketplace relative to contributions to society. •

Institutional design
• Public role is (re)asserted through a set of top down design principles matched by an intentionally wide scope for bottom up creativity and entrepreneurship from faculty and non-academic staff • More complex interwoven structures which combine top-down and bottomup decision-making and shared normative orientations being taken into discussions and practices by a range of actors inside and outside of the university • Innovative organisational structures, programmes, and activity-sets related to the pressing needs of society, interpretations of public values, and specific local and institutional contexts. • Institutionalisation or stabilisation of new ways of working and deinstitutionalising or modifying current behaviours, structures and procedures.
• No country has explicitly prioritised innovation in processes of institutional governance and management, not only for individual universities but also in terms of the higher education system as a whole. • The university as a 'community of knowledge hubs' -not hard institutes but open spaces for intra-and inter-institutional collaboration involving staff and students working together to tackle societal challenges, including active contributions to regional innovation broadly defined. • Empower individual researchers to establish strategic frameworks, identify challenges and agendas of trans-disciplinary actions to address those challenges, with top management permitting an apparent looseness of control. • Innovative ways of working with society at the academic 'coal-face' are incentivised and supported by institution wide mechanisms, for example in terms of degree regulations, recognition of civic engagement in promotion criteria and providing career pathways for those operating in boundary spanning roles. The sum of all these shifts, of the way of thinking, acting and being, from EGO to ECO, characterised by transdisciplinary complex collaborative challenge-pull actions bottom-up co-created by T-shaped people bridging fragmented capacities, gives rise to a new type of university, the challenge-based university, in which students are considered education prosumers engaged with both local and global communities.

Universities, cities and societal challenges:
The EU dimension