Placemaking and the civic university: interface sites as spaces of tension and translation

This chapter examines the role of place within the developing civic agenda for universities, focusing on ‘interface sites’: places where institutional resources, structures and employees come together with civic stakeholders and communities, to engage in shared concerns through programmes of research, teaching and knowledge exchange. It explores three case studies: an urban room, a law clinic, and a natureculture lab. These build on historic precedents, but extend and refine them in relation to their institutional and civic context and aims. These sites are interesting to consider in relation to placemaking because they must function for diverse publics and hybrid programmes, and are continually recalibrated and reconfigured to support emerging relationships and activity. The chapter argues that their scale and necessary responsiveness allows for crucial feedback that not only results in better spaces in relation to their particular civic agenda, but also can support wider institutional learning in ways that can transform the university. It considers how places may be produced in ways that enable civic activity to flourish. The reason for this is to establish a civic agenda not as something a university ‘does’ to place, but rather something that must emerge in collaboration, changing the university as much as it changes the world ‘outside’.