The geographies of studentification: ‘here, there and everywhere’?

ABSTRACT

‘Studentification’ has become an increasingly used concept within academic, public policy and media lexicons of contemporary urban change. The term has recently been embedded within some schools’ curricula. Yet, robust knowledge of the geographic scale of studentification is lacking and the magnitude of the processes is contested. Using descriptive analyses of 1991, 2001 and 2011 UK Census data to investigate a range of geographic resolutions of studentification, this article addresses two main questions: ‘How widespread are processes of studentification within the UK?’ and ‘How have the geographies of studentification changed over the last two decades?’. Evidence is presented for the first time to demonstrate that studentification is a marker of population restructuring across the urban hierarchy, penetrating into more and more locations since the early 1990s. It is also suggested that studentification may have historical origins that predate the establishment of the concept and which, to date, have been under-researched.