Toward a Sustainable Relationship between City and University

While the impact of knowledge assets on regional economies receives much attention in the economic literature, management and planning issues regarding the relationships between academic and local agents are underinvestigated. In this article, it is argued that universities could be a driving force for urban development, provided cities succeed in embedding knowledge in the local social and economic networks, which is seen to depend to a large extent on the balance in the process of exchange between the various stakeholders of higher education: students and academic communities, entrepreneurs, and local communities. A model of sustainable city-university relationship is proposed and matched with evidence from nine case studies of European cities hosting a large higher education sector; the role of policy and planning to sustain and enhance such links is also brought to the fore through the illustration of various best practices in the case studies.