ABSTRACT
‘The University is becoming a transnational bureaucratic corporation, either tied to transnational instances of government such as the European Union or functioning independently, by analogy with a transnational corporation.’ Since Wilhelm von Humboldt’s reforms at the University of Berlin, the modern university has operated to shape national culture, and its existence has been inextricably related to a geopolitical order constituted of centralised nation states. Academic buildings occupy a favourite role in the portfolio of major international architects, and universities themselves, especially the bigger ones, take pride in reclaiming a role in large-scale urban development. In the mid-1990s, the urbanism of a new economy and society based on a commercial use of knowledge could be studied in terms of ‘technopoles’. Many critical diagnoses of the contemporary state of the university, especially in advanced neoliberal economies, highlight the disappearing academic mission of unimpeded critical enquiry under the blows of commercialised knowledge.
