Cities in the making of competitive universities: Barcelona, Berlin and Dublin as destinations for French business schools

Abstract

The expansion of hegemonic forms of global urbanism means that cities seeking a place on the world stage draw ideas and inspirations from, but also see themselves in competition, to other cities. Universities have played a major role in the making of competitive cities. They have been both enrolled in urban and regional ambitions to create competitive creative and knowledge-driven economies, whilst contributing to the reproduction of those very city benchmarks that fuel the aspirations of ‘entrepreneurial cities’. Less is known however about how universities themselves draw on cities for competitive purposes or, in other words, how the comparative imagination of cities impacts universities that, too, are ranked and face ‘entrepreneurial’ dynamics in a globalizing higher education market. By presenting findings on the strategies of French business schools to circumvent funding and global competition pressures by realigning their value proposition to the urban imaginaries of creative, start-up and tech-oriented cities through campus relocation to Barcelona, Berlin and Dublin, I propose to discuss the making of uneven development through higher education actors in cities. I discuss in particular the entanglements between the uneven geographies of investment flows in creative, knowledge-driven and platform capitalism in some European cities and the urban geographies of market-driven universities.