Hattie Smith

Through relocating the university out of the city and into the hinterland, public knowledge is able to escape the economic growth machine of the city and form as a huge, sprawling educational infrastructure as a new way of moving around lost industrial zones, gathering knowledge, activating depressed areas and stretching higher education to allow it to be anywhere and everywhere at the same time, belonging to no one and to everyone. 

The university becomes a regional scale public concern running through the landscape as a form of educational machine rather than a fixed, institution which harbours the private use of reason. The idea of the topological university operating as a new infrastructural network that is partly pedestrian, cycleway and educational traversing the landscape could begin to be repeated across the world on a global scale.

By repositioning the university as an entity whose objectives place public knowledge over capital, an elevated agency in space may begin to assist students and their institutions in resisting the knowledge specificity and measurable quantitative metrics that appear to be replacing real knowledge. 

Spatial agency is the freedom to use education as physical infrastructure where the relationship between regional cycle network and education could be the opportunity students need to gain control of their spatial environment thus increasing spatial agency in order to de-instrumentalise their learning from the forces of neoliberal education.