Univer-Cities: Strategic Implications for Asia

Readings from Cambridge and Berkeley to Singapore

Univer-cities: Strategic Implications for Asia aims to redefine the multi-faceted symbiotic relationship between universities and host cities. The four readings in this reader will invite readers to challenge the traditional view of what a university is as a place, and re-define the university as a space; drawing discoverers, creators, and seekers who are keen to preserve and enhance the value of higher education in Asia. This reader will also show how universities can make a huge and innovative impact on the immediate, surrounding, and global communities that are drawn into its ambit of its campus and sought out by the university in inter-univer-city and trans-displinary linkages.

Written by worldly academic leaders and professionals from Berkeley, Cambridge, Canberra and Singapore — who are prominent in fields of higher education strategy, campus cum urban planning, design, and architecture — the readings will shed some light on the future and power of univer-cities.

It also shares seven strategic implications the concept has on Asian universities — this is especially timely and apt for a part of the world where education, togetherness, hard work, high-savings rates, and economic growth are emerging tectonic changes that the trinity of China, India and the Southeast Asian region engenders. It is no wonder that several top Asian cities have universities that have been ranked among the Top 50 universities in the world.

Contents:

• Setting the Conversation on Univer-Cities: Strategic Implications for Asia (Anthony SC Teo)
• Cambridge Futures: Enabling Consensus on Growth and Change (Peter Carolin)
• Berkeley: Campus and Community (Richard Bender, Emily Marthinsen, and John Parman)
• Conversations in Futures of Univer-Cities in the Asia Pacific: Singapore — Place and Education in the 21st Century (Harold Guida and Andrew Donnelly)
• Yunnan Gardens Master Plan (with Postscripts) (Anthony SC Teo)
• Appendix
• Index

Readership: Campus planners, architects, landscape and lighting consultants, city planners, mayors, futurists, educators.
Key Features:

• This is an artistically-designed compact reader which explains the idea of univer-cities. Prominent authors from Cambridge, Berkeley, Canberra, and Singapore have contributed four evocative readings that have been written in a conversationally thought-provoking manner
• The challenges that universities face in this day and age are re-defined and they are not presented as pre-defined notions
• The book is a prelude to an envisaged Conference about Univer-cities that is slated to be held at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) on 18th November 2013. The reader will show how Singapore has the potential of becoming a compelling Univer-city and it emphasizes on NTU's current univer-city status as a ‘garden-Univer-city’ (of a quadro-plaited university in a garden within a greater garden city-state of Singapore)