University of Bergamo: The ‘Diffuse Campus’ as a Tool for Adapting to Urban Changes

In considering the university an inhabited space, we must contemplate the nature of the relationships established over time between the university’s facilities and their urban contexts. Indeed, cities are spaces of intense proximity, as are ‘university campuses’ (Sassen, 2012), but when universities are embedded within a city, as in the European tradition, the flows of university life and of the city overlap, interact and—sometime—conflict. As such, this paper explores the impact of the university space on the historical and urban fabric, and it tries to answer whether the university is simply ‘located in the city’ or an actual ‘part of the city’ (Klump & Bickl, 2012).

In the Italian context, universities recognisable as ‘part of the city’ are predominantly those having ancient foundations and located in small- to medium-sized cities. Thus, the presence of campuses over time, in addition to establishing themselves as urban cultural engines, has led to the creation of a mental map of inhabitants, among which the most significant examples are Bologna, Siena and Padova.

For this reason, we present a case study of the Università degli studi di Bergamo (founded in 1968) and its articulated urban layout, with three campuses: humanities, law/economics and engineering. During the settlement process, many institutional and local actors proposed a suburban and unique campus model for the university, at the edge of the city. Conversely, the governance opted for a different model, distributing the university’s three campuses across the territory but within urban settlements, a position that has been re-affirmed over time by several rectors.