oung people increasingly tend to have children too late and too few, says Veisa Heikki Kemppainen from the University of Oulu, Finland. As a result, the number of students will decline, making universities oversized for their purpose — including their estates and housing stock.
During the UNIC Staff Week “Redesigning the Campus in the City,” practitioners and campus‑planning experts from across Europe — including representatives from Cork, Oulu, Zagreb, Łódź, Brussels, Malmö, Liège, Bochum, and Rotterdam — gathered at the University of Liège to discuss how campuses can be adapted to changing student numbers.
One of the most striking examples is the city of Łódź (pronounced “woosj”). The city grew rapidly because of its central location in Poland: from 300,000 inhabitants in the late 19th century to 850,000 in the 1980s, before shrinking to its current 650,000, and still declining. The number of students enrolled at the University of Łódź is also falling.
Despite this demographic trend, the size of the academic system has not adjusted. Since the 1990s, new universities and schools have been established. According to Maciej Sysak, chancellor at the University of Łódź, the city now hosts five universities and academies. All institutions struggle to align their organizational size with the shrinking student population and decreasing public funding. They are simply too large. How should they respond?
This challenge is particularly acute for campus management. Fewer students mean less demand for educational and office space, as well as lower income. New campus strategies are needed: redistributing office and teaching spaces among users, enabling universities to vacate buildings and reduce costs.
Lukas Klöter of Ruhr University Bochum faces a similar situation. His campus has become too large for its current purpose, and buildings need to be vacated for redevelopment. His task is to persuade staff to exchange traditional private offices for new work environments, including hybrid working and desk sharing. This is difficult, as academic staff are accustomed to having large, individual offices. How can the culture of “my own room” be changed, especially when its impact on university housing costs and carbon emissions is often overlooked?
Clarifying that universities operate with a single budget, meaning each euro can be spent only once, either on additional office space or on education and research, helps shift the mindset. Visionary concepts, such as repurposing campus spaces for external partners and transforming the campus into an innovation hub within the city, can also support this transition.
