The Octopus Among Us

If we think about what drives land use in Boone County, once, long ago, we might have said the Missouri River, or perhaps one of those trails to the far west...

But now, clearly, land use is shaped by the University, whose emblem should perhaps not be a tiger.

           to

?

I'd identify 4 obvious ways that this happens. 

1.  There is the area of the central campus itself.  While there is a stable, if always under reconstruction, core or the red and white campuses, contiguous expansion continues, bounded only by the resistance of people's attachment to places on the boundaries.  Such attachment didn't work for The Shack, but so far people's memory has been a buffer for places such as Shakespeare's Pizza and The Berg.

2.  The University owns and acquires land throughout the county, for various research purposes.

3.  Sports and business--the economic impact of the University shapes the rest of the city, supporting more variety and color than any midwestern town of some 80k could reasonably expect without government and parental cash-bleeding pocketbooks, even as it also endows us with more pizza places and nondescript bars than we need.  And sports?  Football weekends float many businesses through the long droughts of summer, and the swell of football has developed enough hotels that Columbia can also sustain a robust convention trade.

4.  But one huge impact--housing.  Three groups are involved--staff, students, and faculty.  Staff housing may be the least identifiable, since this population is less separate from the general community--"it's a job."  Students do tend to live in clusters, once heavily in the dorms, and in the grand mansions of the Greek system, and now in places like East Campus and the fringes of mouldering roach motels and septic wastelands where George Romero could easily set the next zombie apocalypse film.  These have been much supplemented by mushroom pop up apartment buildings, a few stable and long-term, and many rushed to completion even in this year of supposed economic glum.  A number of these are downtown, which will encourage not only a new party scene, but might, might, encourage a resurgence in the District with walkable services and entertainment.  Others, like The Links, many sites to the southeast, and the new burgeoning Domain, remove students from both downtown and the University.  (And there is what one friend described as a kind of 'bait and switch'--overly ambitious developers, building on whatever land they snap up, filling apartments with first-year discount rents, selling the property to buyers who find they must vastly increase rents to make a profit, which drives students out, and...)

Interesting could be the patterns of faculty housing.  In the 60s and 70s, many were concentrated in the West Broadway "faculty ghetto"--at least many of the more prosperous, senior faculty.  Naively, it seems like many faculty have now migrated south of town, into new covenanted subdivisions, or becoming pioneers of our local southern amenity landscape.  I wonder whether faculty propelled the shift, or if developers coaxed this new reality.  Soren mentions that there may also be an economic division in choice faculty zones.

It would be fun to trace faculty housing clusters through 2 or 3 base years, to look for patterns, before some more qualitative interviews.

Wish I knew Actor Network Theory for all this, but I don't.  Anyway, Matt F. is going to unravel all of this.


later, bob