University Quarter as a form of cultural interaction between the University and the city

Baraboshina Natal'ya Vladimirovna ORCID: 0000-0003-2312-9571 PhD in Philosophy Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies, Samara State Medical University 443099, Russia, Samara region, Samara, Chapaevskaya str., 89 baraboshina@mail.ru Ilivitskaya Larisa Gennad'evna ORCID: 0000-0003-3339-9946 Doctor of Philosophy Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies, Samara State Medical University 443099, Russia, Samara region, Samara, Chapaevskaya str., 89 laraili@mail.ru

Stepanov Ivan Viktorovich ORCID: 0000-0003-1426-6064 PhD in History Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies, Samara State Medical University 443013, Russia, Samara region, Samara, Tukhachevsky str., 226, office 4 stivan1981@mail.ru

The city and the university are significant cultural phenomena, the relations between which are extremely strong interdependent. The very beginning of the joint existence of the city and the university testifies to this more than clearly. So, on the one hand, the university simply needs a city for its emergence and existence. As T. Maurer notes in an article on the urban context of the evolution of universities, "a university is an urban invention" ^{[8, p. 5]}. On the other hand, at least a large city without a university simply cannot take place. The university grows in the city and "grows" into the city, changing it and becoming one of the most significant factors of its development. The presence of the university in the city inevitably presupposes their joint existence. In fairness, it should be noted that the process of incorporation of "people in robes" into urban space has not always been peaceful. Paris (student riot of 1229), Oxford (student riot on St. Scholastica's Day 1355), Yale (a fight between students and sailors in 1806, a clash with city firefighters in 1841) set the agenda for this interaction for many years.

A city in which there is a university is already a different city, with a different status, with a different potential: "... university cities are very different in the cultural and social sense from non-university ones" ^{[2, p. 588]}. The powerful influence of the university is due to the fact that it has always trained the professionals necessary for the city. In addition, the university was a place of concentration of people with a high level of education, being a source of innovative, cultural, creative impulses; acting as a producer and translator of knowledge, socio-cultural norms, samples.

Currently, the importance of the university is increasing many times. Due to its high intellectual and general humanitarian activity, it is considered as a city-forming enterprise, a driver of city development, a locomotive of modernization, a "social machine for the production of the future" ^[3]. As V.A. Konev notes: "We live in a time when public life is built not around factories, as it was in industrial society, but around universities, laboratories, scientific seminars and congresses, which are the centers of the emergence of new ideas and civilizational innovations" ^{[4, p. 265]}.

Understanding and recognition of the fact that the purpose of the university is not limited only to scientific and educational activities has become a catalyst for discussions about its third mission. Although no one disputes this idea itself, the approaches outlining its content are extremely diverse. As many authors rightly point out, "the clear contours of the Russian model have not yet been determined" ^{[5, p. 19]}. Moreover, there is an opinion that it is not possible to develop a single, universal position on this issue at all, since "it will always be characterized by pronounced "local" specifics" ^{[6, p. 27]}.

Without going into the content of the unfolding controversy, we would like to address one of the possible manifestations of the "third mission", namely, the "social position of the university in relation to its territory" ^{[6, p. 22]}. It seems that this aspect directly raises the question of the phenomenon of university presence in the city space, which is the focus of this article. It is particularly relevant in connection with the Decree of the Government of the Russian Federation dated July 28, 2021 (No. 1268) "On the implementation of the project to create an innovative educational environment (campuses) using public-private partnership mechanisms and concession agreements", adopted within the framework of the federal project "Development of infrastructure for Research and training", which sets the regions the task of creating modern university campuses. The campus in the document is interpreted as "a set of functionally related objects of immovable property and movable property, technologically connected with such immovable property and intended for its operation, united by a single purpose for comprehensive provision of educational, innovative, scientific, scientific and technical activities, intended including for accommodation and (or) accommodation, medical support, recreation and tourism, physical culture and sports, catering, cultural activities, meeting other needs of students, pedagogical, scientific and other employees of educational institutions of higher education and (or) scientific organizations". The proposed formulation is very general (streamlined) in nature, allowing us to approach the organization of university campuses in urban space in different ways. But in any case, whatever vector of implementation of the proposed university structure is adopted, it will inevitably have an impact on the urban space. To paraphrase A. Lefebvre's phrase about the city, it can be argued that a university is not conceivable "without a clear idea of the space it occupies, which it appropriates (or discards)?" ^{[7, p. 9]}.

The analysis of this influence can be carried out from different positions. One of the possible optics of the cultural-philosophical approach to the analysis of university presence in urban space is the study of its semantic component. I.I. Mitin argues that "the subject of interpretation of space and place, all kinds of ideas about the territory and (re)understanding the landscape, especially urban, has become relevant in the last decade and a half for a number of completely different scientific disciplines: from geography to semiotics, from philosophy to tourist studies, from cultural ecology to social anthropology" ^{[8, p. 62]}. The approach presented in the paper to the analysis of the interaction of the city and the university is based on their understanding, first of all, as a place, which makes it possible to move from the level of material objects to the level of representations about them. After all, it is possible to talk about a place only when "locality is surrounded by human meaning" ^{[9, p. 209]}. It is the endowment of space with meaning and meaning that provides it with the status of a place. This allows us to consider the university as a significant and iconic structure of urban space, capable of giving it a new semantic content.

In our opinion, today we can talk about at least four forms of co-existence of the city and the university, grouped around two basic directions. Highlighting these areas, we proceed with a certain degree of conditionality from the priority of the city and the university in relation to each other. If priority is given to the university, and it is it that acts as the basic social institution that sets and determines the specifics of the urban structure (the university-city line), then the university city acts as a form of this kind of relationship. In the case when the city is put in the first place, providing its own space for the unfolding of university forms of existence (the city – university line), then we can talk about the university itself, the university campus and the university quarter. In this article, the main focus will be on the university quarter. But in the most general terms, we will also focus on other forms of university presence, primarily due to the need to differentiate these forms and determine the specifics and possibilities of the actual subject of our consideration.

The first form from the point of view of the scale of influence on the formation of urban space, of course, is the phenomenon called "university city". This concept is not just a statement of the fact of the presence of one or more universities in the city. There are about 20 thousand universities and 2 million 660 thousand settlements in the world today. The status of a "university city" among the latter has about one and a half hundred. Most of them are concentrated in Europe and the USA. The university cities of Europe are: Oxford, Ghent, Bologna, Marburg, Cambridge, Salamanca, Leuven, G?ttingen, Tubingen, St. Andrews, Poitiers, etc. In the USA, everyone knows the cities whose universities are in the Ivy League: Providence, Hanover (New Hampshire), Ithaca, Cambridge (Massachusetts), New Haven.

The vital activity of the university city is inextricably linked with science and education, it is the scientific and educational sector that creates the basic part of its economy, acts as the factor that determines the lifestyle and the specifics of the composition of the population. The university status of the city inevitably imposes significant requirements on the spatial organization of the latter. It is the university that determines the specifics of urban space. So, a university city is, first of all, an average city (the population of the city ranges from 100 thousand to 1 million people). Its infrastructure and architecture is tailored to the infrastructure and architecture of the university campus, and the objects of the latter are no more than half an hour away from each other. Such a city will necessarily require a developed creative environment and a large number of "third places" ^[10]. At the same time, the university not only "organizes" the city, in fact, it acts as its main symbol, a brand that captures its "cultural, extremely high meaning" ^{[11, p. 455]}.

An appeal to the experience of Russia indicates that the phenomenon of university cities, unfortunately, turned out to be unclaimed initially. "Due to the historical features of the formation of the higher education system in Russia, the classical type of a small university city with a leading university performing the functions of a city-forming core has not become widespread" ^{[12, p. 96]}. For the modern domestic reality, despite the world experience demonstrating their huge potential and significant advantages over traditional industrial cities, the "university city" is more an area of scientific interest than the sphere of practical implementation of this idea. The only Russian city claiming the status of a university and actively working in this direction is Tomsk, in the charter of which the city-forming role of the scientific and educational complex is fixed. In 2015, the Tomsk City Hall registered the trademark "Student capital of Russia". Developing the idea of Tomsk as a university city, its creators relied on the European model.

Now let's turn to the forms of the second direction. Speaking about the university, we immediately note a certain amount of conditionality in the name of this form. It would be more correct to designate it as a university and a student quarter. It should be clarified that the university does not always generate education around itself, which is capable of acquiring a pronounced existence as a special urban phenomenon at the mental level. However, speaking about the university, we focus on the fact that it does not exist autonomously. Numerous studies clearly show that a university, taken as an element of urban space, regardless of the type of "citizenship" is able to significantly change the appearance of urban infrastructure. Thus, urbanist and geographer A. Brun argues that universities had a significant impact on the spatial organization of the city. Located mostly in the immediate center of the city, they form the so-called student quarters ^[13]. A kind of reference model for the presence of a student settlement in the urban space is the Latin Quarter (Quartier Latin). Not being part of the official structure of the administrative division of the city (the territory of the 5th and 6th administrative districts), the quarter on the left bank of the Seine is strongly associated with the Sorbonne – the symbol of the great University of Paris. Today, the Association of Universities of the Saint-Genevieve Hill includes schools and universities of various profiles, such as the Paris Higher National School of Mining, the Higher Normal School, the Pierre and Marie Curie University, the Pantheon-Assas University, etc. The quarter includes not only university buildings and libraries, but also specialty stores, creative studios, exhibition galleries and other creative spaces. As Johan G. Wissema notes, the quarter, since the time of overcoming medieval scholasticism, was intended to become a place where there is no distance between auctoritates (doctors of sciences who had knowledge) and students, between specialists and amateurs, between technical knowledge and humanitarian knowledge ^[14]. In this and similar quarters of other European cities, the traditions of professional associations, student communes built on the principle of joint rental of housing and responsible use of public territories were honed. Currently, many student quarters of European cities are experiencing a crisis. In many ways, this is an ideological crisis, the consequence of which is the degeneration of student quarters into ghettos ^[15]. Student ghettos are spaces permeated with the spirit of resistance, rebellion and outrage, often not the most prosperous in terms of ecology, quality of infrastructure and safety of life. The housing stock in these areas is gradually declining, as most of the apartments have been rented out for a long time, the autochthonous population is increasingly shrinking and being replaced by marginals and migrants. Thus, the historical and cultural specificity of the elite "university place" in the city is lost, the university community is deprived of the support of citizens and municipalities.

If we turn to the Russian experience, the appearance of the university in the city caused the launch of all the same processes that were characteristic of European student quarters. Thus, in the work devoted to the history of Kazan, it is argued that the emergence of Kazan Imperial University entailed significant changes in urban space: "With academic buildings, apartments of teachers, students, employees, libraries, a botanical garden, a country observatory, as well as numerous taverns, shops selling things necessary for university people, bookstores serving their intellectual needs, the university has grown into the body of the city, changing its "anatomy", toponymy..." ^{[16, p. 76]}. However, it is still too early to talk about negative trends in the presence of the student quarter in the urban space. On the contrary, studies show that there is a direct relationship between the perception of the district as a university and the assessment of its degree of comfort for citizens and students ^[17].

Summing up all the above, we can state the fact that the university forms centrifugal forces that spread its influence to nearby territories. Moreover, we are talking not only about changing the social, household, cultural infrastructure, but also about the perception of the territory around the university by citizens. At the mental level, ideas arise that allow us to comprehend the urban space next to the university as an entity with its own specifics, which makes it different from other urban spaces. It is this integrity that is defined using concepts such as "student quarter", "university district", etc. Analogues, references, "replicas" of the Latin Quarter described above exist in Cologne, Kishenev, Moscow, Tyumen and a number of other cities. It should be emphasized here that these areas are not the result of purposeful planning decisions. They are clear evidence of the successful "germination" of the university into the fabric of urban life, which does not give grounds for their conceptualization as "foreign bodies" in the space of the city. At the same time, their territorial separation of "university districts" is primarily connected with the semantic content of the city, and the name is present only in the urban discourse of residents.

The university campus, being another form of the university's presence in the city, unlike the student quarter, is just an administrative unit and the result of managerial and architectural decisions.

The campus model of the student community in an urban environment has become widespread thanks to the practices of caring for students at American universities ^{[18; p.1]}. The University campus offers families strict parental control on the principle of "in loco parentis" (a legal doctrine dating back to English common law, according to which a certain person (teacher, university) assumes parental rights and responsibilities without performing the formalities of legal adoption), representing an integral university complex with a unique architectural and spatial appearance ^{[19, p. 81]}. The complex includes educational, experimental, industrial, recreational areas within walking distance from each other and in an isolated area from the city. The legislator of such a form can be considered the University of Boston in the USA.

The campus can be located directly in the urban environment or be taken out of it as a special settlement (a city within a city). But, in both cases, these are specific, largely pseudo–urban spaces with high building density, access restriction systems and video surveillance, which only imitate the main urban objects - pedestrian streets, squares, residential quarters, etc. ^{[20, p.5]}.   

City residents often do not see advantages in such a neighborhood, since denial of access to the use of public space leads to the formation of an exclusion space ^{[21, p. 76; 22, p. 163]}. Although, it should be noted that currently the city authorities of many American and European cities are concerned about the creation of programs for the integration of university clusters into the fabric of urban life. "The presence of a campus in a big city can be considered as a prestige factor," Dr. Lawrence Martin, director of the Center for Public Partnership at the University of Central Florida, comments on the situation. In his opinion, the presence of a university in the city attracts new residents with the diversity and creativity of urban practices, indicates the presence of unique opportunities and points of growth of the city ^[23]. The state policy initiates the rebranding of campuses, their reformatting as innovation centers, industrial and innovation parks.

So, the specificity of the university campus as a form of presence is that its appearance in the city is purposeful, the boundaries have a fairly clear outline, the set of infrastructure elements has a certain degree of variability, but at the same time is strictly subordinated to scientific and educational orientations, which does not exclude the solution of everyday and relaxation tasks. Without dwelling on the various variations of this form, it should be noted that it is characterized (with a certain degree of conditionality) by isolation, closeness, closeness, targeting "for one's own". The involvement of the university campus in the daily life of urban life is extremely low, as is integration into the urban environment.

The University Quarter is a new form of interaction between the university and the city, which has great potential and significant advantages over traditional options. Its necessity, first of all, is connected with the further expansion of the scope of interaction between the university and the urban community. On the one hand, such an "exit" is not spontaneous, but of a project nature, not fitting into the popular scheme of "it happened so historically." The University quarter is a form with clearly defined goals and well–thought-out urban forms of their solution. On the other hand, the university quarter is a kind of initially "open system" that does not assume rigid boundaries along the line of distinction between "university" and "urban". It is "non-violently" inscribed into the urban space, or vice versa, it is fundamentally taken out for it. It is a single entity with the city, which does not assume strict targeting. All city residents have the "right" to the space of the university quarter. It is necessary to point out one more feature of its unfolding. The University quarter does not assume the situation of having an "empty" space, free from urban development, allowing it to start from scratch. It is focused on the transformation of the existing, equipped, habitable urban environment. Its task is to create a new urban reality, give it a new "face", and also strengthen the competitiveness of the university itself associated with it. In other words, the university quarter, being a projected, open system, assumes the implementation of such solutions that should provide a completely new quality of development of the city and the university, giving each of them a new sound.

Turning to specific projects for the implementation of a university quarter of this kind, we will focus on two versions offered by the largest Samara universities. These projects offer strategies of different form and content, demonstrating the variability of the form of university presence under consideration. Let's make a reservation right away that their assessment comes from the standpoint of "representation of space" (A. Lefevre). Questions about how, if they are implemented, expectations will coincide with reality, whether the "space of representation" and "spatial practices" (A. Lefevre) will correspond with the "conceived space" require separate study in the future.

Samara National Research University named after Academician S.P. Korolev proposed a project of an interuniversity student quarter. The project has significant potential, covering the territory of one of the largest park areas of Samara (Botanical garden), already owned by the university, connecting two major city highways, Novo-Sadovaya Street and Moskovskoe Highway, through the continuation of Aurora Street, assuming the modernization of the public and business zone of regional significance in the Postnikov Ravine area. It is planned to equip the recreation area of the center.

In fact, this project is an attempt to form a new public space of the city. Moreover, it is not only about expanding the university area of the city. To a greater extent, it is assumed that the city will enter the university, the inclusion of urban life in university practices. One of the results should be the recoding of a significant area. Instead of disparate urban loci, a single space should appear, combining the various functionality offered to the city by the university. The users of the updated territory should not be participants in the educational process (students or teachers), but citizens.

Of course, the project has issues of organizational, architectural, urban planning plans. However, I would like to draw attention to its conceptual positioning as an "interuniversity student quarter". At the same time, the center of attraction of the territory proposed for development is, first of all, the initiator university. Only one Samara university, Samara State Technical University, also falls into the orbit of the proposed project, and then not by its main territories.

Another project of the university quarter is proposed by Samara State Medical University. Its implementation involves the territory that is part of the historical center of Samara (within the boundaries of Chapaevskaya, Ulyanovsk, Molodogvardeyskaya, Studentskiy Pereulok streets), on which the facilities of the four largest universities of Samara (Samara State Medical University, Samara State Technical University, Samara National Research University named after Academician S.P. Korolev, Samara State University of Economics) are located. The project does not provide for the reconstruction of the territory. It is aimed at changing its vision by the citizens. Detached, unrelated university buildings are proposed to be presented as a space united by a common history. This "university quarter" refers meaningfully to the events of the 40s of the XX century, when the largest military factories were evacuated to Kuibyshev (now Samara), technical and medical specialists arrived. This contributed, on the one hand, to the opening of new institutions in the city. On the other hand, existing universities have significantly expanded their teaching staff with professional staff. Thus, within the framework of the proposed project, the university quarter is conceived primarily as a historical space. It is intended to show the diversity of connections between the city and the university and to introduce a new semantic sound into the usual figurative series associated with the city: merchant, industrial, etc. The arrangement of the territory within the boundaries of the "university quarter" will contribute to the implementation of various excursion and educational programs, allowing to expand the historical appearance of the city, to show the role of universities in its development in as city-forming institutions.

So, the development of universities is currently on the path of finding new forms of their interaction with the city and developing different communication methods for their intended purpose. These processes are fruitful for both sides. The existing multi-channel live communication between the university and the city has contributed and continues to contribute to the expansion of the positive effect in the formation of both the urban and university environment, acting as a factor in their innovative development.