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AbstractAn analysis of the motivations of university students from Temuco (Chile) and Montréal (Canada) to change residence during the COVID-19 pandemic is presented based on data from a simultaneous survey in the two cities carried out in 2021. Quantitative analysis based on Principal Component Analysis showed a bifurcation between both cases despite the similarities they presented. Contrary to expectations that moves are first and foremost about the redundancy of student accommodation during the temporary transition to online learning or the need for more amenable study space in the home, the results highlight the primacy of psychological motivations, although economic, material and to a lesser extent family-related reasons for moving remain important. The context of each case study also allows for establishing differences between motivations more closely linked to material aspects and psychological and physical well-being in Montréal, and family-related motivations and psychological well-being in Temuco. Exploring this tension between individual motivations and urban contexts opens a promising way forward for new comparative studies in student housing and studentification research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Student housing represents a contentious local policy issue in university cities in North America and beyond, related to both the conversion of existing housing to student rentals and the development of private purpose-built student accommodations. Yet little research has considered the variety of approaches municipalities across an urban system have adopted to address student housing issues through land-use planning and their subsequent influence on development patterns. Through an analysis of planning documents in all 15 Ontario urban areas with a primary campus of the province's 20 public universities, we identify four broad approaches. These range from minimal intervention to covertly restricting student housing development, directing student housing away from established neighborhoods, and enabling high-density redevelopment of a residential district to accommodate students. Municipalities' approaches reflect local context, notably their relationship to the province's regional growth management plans. Case studies demonstrate how each approach has shaped purpose-built student accommodation development locally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on 'studentification', or the concentration of students in particular neighbourhoods, whether in older shared rental housing or new purpose-built student accommodations, has neglected questions of difference, including gender. Yet while such questions have been the purview of student geographies more broadly, the latter have seldom extended analyses to neighbourhood-scale urban processes. Just as feminist urban geographers have shown gentrification to be a gendered phenomenon, I demonstrate how studentification likewise relies on and (re)produces certain gender relations, drawing on a case study of Waterloo, Canada. Specifically, studentification is linked to women's enrolment trends, masculinist modes of profit-oriented urban development, and gendered discourses of urban safety. The analysis highlights the need for renewed dialogue between disparate literatures on the geography of studentification and student geographies of housing and home to further our understanding of the role of social difference in studentification processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of purpose‐built student accommodation (PBSA) as a 'global' asset class has physically and socially transformed university cities through 'new‐build studentification' implicated in the financialization of urban space. Yet, the COVID‐19 pandemic has exposed the risk inherent in this asset's reliance on a narrow submarket, as students' domestic and international mobilities were temporarily disrupted. We interrogate PBSA providers' response to the pandemic through the analysis of real estate consultancy reports, firms' annual reports and other investor‐facing documents, in Africa, Australia, Europe and North America, demonstrating how the financialization of this niche sector is sustained through crisis. Tactics include building goodwill to expand market share, temporarily reorienting towards domestic students and operational strategies to cut costs and increase revenues. Despite the sector's optimism, these approaches amplify existing trends of finance‐driven new‐build studentification in university cities, characterized by uneven development, the privatization of student housing and deepening class and age segregation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While past research into young people’s transitions out of the parental home identified a distinct student housing pathway offering an institutionally supported ‘housing advantage’, more recently scholars have pointed to widespread housing precarity among university students, reconceptualising the housing challenges students face as a ‘hidden curriculum’ that reinforces inequalities. Meanwhile, time spent navigating this hidden curriculum in increasingly widespread purpose-built student accommodations (PBSA) has the potential to reshape the student habitus, fostering future preferences for the high-density, privatized urban space PBSA represents. This paper re-examines these notions, drawing on interviews with 27 students in Waterloo, Canada, regarding their past experiences and future expectations of housing. While the interviews reveal a multitude of pathways, concepts of housing advantage and hidden curriculum are not as contradictory as they may appear, with many students benefitting from supports offered by university residences before facing an expensive, discriminatory and predatory rental market. Although students’ experiences normalized high-density living, they did not necessarily supersede long-term preferences for detached home ownership, and access to amenities was more important than private space as such. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concentration of students in neighbourhoods through processes of studentification has often precipitated conflicts with other residents centred on behavioural issues and perceived neighbourhood decline. Dominant policy responses have been exclusive in nature, attempting to restrict where students can live or to encourage them to live in purpose-built student accommodation in designated areas. Drawing primarily on interviews with key informants in Waterloo, Canada, I examine a process of 'post-studentification' where non-student residents are instead integrated into student-dominated neighbourhoods through urban intensification, promoted by an alternative policy approach. I outline this process and its links to other forms of urban change. Despite the promise of a more inclusive strategy to mitigate the challenges of studentification, I find that post-studentification is subject to several pitfalls related to local planning objectives, local contingencies and inequalities with respect to class, age and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ehrenhalt, Alan. The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City. New York: Alfred A. Knopf 2012. 288 p. ISBN 978-0-307-27274-4. It seems a change has come about in [...]

This paper demonstrates the infiltration of finance into increasingly niche real estate sectors, taking the example of the emergent Canadian purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA) sector since 2011. Drawing on a novel database of PBSA, qualitative document analysis, and key informant interviews, we uncover the business strategies and geographic patterns of investment in the sector. We then consider the local impacts of this phenomenon in Waterloo, Ontario, the country's largest PBSA market, where finance-driven new-build studentification has contributed to higher housing costs and age segregation. This process of financialization has differed from other housing sectors as it depends on the creation of new student housing to provide an avenue for investment therein. At the same time, finance-driven new-build studentification functions as a spatial fix by directing investment to secondary cities. However, this process has been fragile, marked as much by failure as success, pointing to the limits of financialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regulating the negative impacts of private off-campus student housing on neighbourhoods, especially where it is concentrated by processes of 'studentification,' is a pressing planning issue in the knowledge economy city where universities are expanding. We piece together a history of planning for student housing in Waterloo, Ontario from 1986 to 2016 through an analysis of planning documents. Over this time, planning has proactively anticipated changes and attempted to direct development accordingly in ways that extend beyond 'studentified' areas. We therefore argue for greater attention to the broader 'urban dormitory' in which students live across the city. Lessons from Waterloo illustrate that planning in cities with significant off-campus housing must be adaptive to effectively manage the urban dormitory, as investment in high-density housing has alleviated supply constraints but did not prevent neighbourhood disruptions. A valuable role for planning is in structuring the public realm, providing amenities, and regulating unit size and design of new development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Challenges arising from changing demographics, expensive housing, and precarious labor have prompted recent interest in the residential geographies of young adults. Yet, despite attention to young adults' diverse housing pathways, I argue that greater focus is needed on the place-based and spatial underpinnings and effects of particular housing pathways: Connections to urban processes of “youthification”—the concentration of young adults in dense neighborhoods—and “studentification”—whereby an area becomes dominated by university students—remain underdeveloped, as do linkages between these phenomena and gentrification. I explore these connections through a critical review of extant literature to show that the enactment of some pathways is associated with particular urban processes, which might foreclose certain pathways for other individuals. Finally, I identify three crucial areas of inquiry: (1) how youthification, studentification, and gentrification interact; (2) how these processes shape and are shaped by diverging individual housing pathways; and (3) how differences among young adults such as race, ethnicity, and gender intersect with age in the course of these processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]