Contested spaces of novelty and heritage

representing and building new universities in post-war Sweden and Britain

Authors

• Henrik Widmark

Abstract

Contested Spaces of Novelty and Heritage: Representing and building new universities in post-war Sweden and Britain

Building a new university or a university college is to materialise ideas of higher education. It also forms spaces of heritage, novelty and education. Although these spaces are formed, and continually transformed, by international developments, they have their roots in the local circumstances. In this article British and Swedish post-war efforts are compared by concentrating on the University of East Anglia in Norwich and the University of Essex in Colchester, and on the Södertörn University College in Flemingsberg- Stockholm and Gotland University in Visby. The differences between the British and Swedish examples are vast, and the objective of the comparison is to single out features which explain the main issues of the forming of spaces of heritage and novelty in both university milieus. The article studies how the built milieu transforms space, and how university space is represented through the dialectics of novelty and heritage and of local place and international space.