The University and The City

This chapter aims at investigating how the humanities can contribute to understanding the city from the specific angle of its relation to the university, here understood as a mate rial and immaterial site of knowledge and values production. Contemporary processes of urbanisation represent a complex phenomenon which is affecting all parts of the world, is accelerating the effects of globalisation and is deeply reshaping, among other things, the role played by the university as one of the historically privileged places where the humanities have been formulated, transmitted, defended and critically (re)thought within the contemporary world. The ‘becoming urban of the planet’ undoubtedly constitutes new challenges but also opportunities for rethinking the production, transmission and circula tion of knowledge, and it is therefore of crucial importance to understand this process of transformation in the light of the new humanities.