Sustainable developing of complex campuses: The management challenge

Abstract

Always has been said that the spirit and university life is not in the classroom, but rather in the corridors, patios, cafes... The prestige, opinion and reputation of a university are not acquired solely providing a good education and creating significant research projects. It is also necessary to create an attractive and pleasant space, generator of culture, knowledge, innovation, leisure, work… in sort, generator of life; and which is at the cutting edge of what an institution of excellence as it is a university deserves. It is the ideal situation that all universities would like to get. It is the mission of a university. Also for the University of Liege (ULg), who has on the campus of Sart Tilman an excellent opportunity to develop this mission. At this point, however, several questions arise in the ULg managing board: How is this situation achieved? Should the campus be remodelled from top to bottom? Is necessary to incorporate new technology companies in the area? Should the university build large spaces and devastate the natural landscape that characterizes this particular campus? The answer to these questions and hypotheses is not simple because it must be considered not only the social opinion, but also the environmental impacts and economic opportunities allowed by the current context. These three factors – social, environmental and economic – play a decisive role, have to be valued according to the situation presented today and the future perspective, and must be integrated into the mission of the university. Then, when this occurs, the university gets framed in what is known as sustainable development, which moves towards consistent and coherent decision making. So, considering that every university has to focus its action strategy framing the concept of sustainable development, what is proposed in this project is a study of the actions or initiatives that are being developed at operational level in other European campuses – which also frame sustainable development –, so as to, afterwards, analyse if they are interesting to develop in the near future on the campus of Sart Tilman or not. In other words, it can be said that the project presented in the following pages is the result of performing two processes. First, a benchmarking process, which permits to identify these different initiatives that are being implemented in a similar context, a standalone university campus, in Switzerland (EPFL), Netherlands (TU/e), and France (Lille 1). In addition, this process has been focused in two fields: mobility and facilities on campus (accommodation, business and other services) Second, a discussion process about whether the initiatives collected are developable in the Sart Tilman campus or not. The discussion is based on the results provided by the Q-methodology, a survey technique which analyses the viewpoints of different respondents, in this case some actors involved in the decision-making of the campus.