Bethany Harrison

The sharing and curation of knowledge can be viewed as a transfer of “cultural capital”, as coined by Pierre Bourdieu, where an individual gains value through aspects of their learned attributes.

This process has come to define the university. 

Ultimately, this reinforces the dominance of league tables and opinion polls to gain fee-paying students. Striving to conflate cultural capital with institutional economic capital to produce human capital that promotes personal gain within the workplace.
The neoliberal university thrives on and is sustained by the branded city. Neoliberal capitalism thrives from a sense of self-inspired entrepreneurship, which is also true within current models of higher education. 

The Ruhr Region of North Rhine Westphalia hosts a vast landscape of now decommissioned industrial sites, relinquished from their proper purpose. Preserved in aspic to feed touristic curiosity, might these powerful, gigantic infrastructures stimulate a more positive trajectory for the economy, which succeeds in forming a new knowledge economy?

Using the coking plant of Zollverein, Essen - the largest in the world - as the geometric heart of an idea for a regional-scale university. This is a university which supplants ideas of a singular institution and individual human capital, instead disseminating public knowledge into the entire landscape.