‘Living off the campus’: urban geographies of change and studentification in Beijing, China

Studies of the connections between urban geographies and studentification have an international signature across continents. Yet, the transformative effects of student populations in China are under-stated within theorizations of urban change, despite unprecedented demands for student housing. In this paper, we explore neighborhood change in Haidianlu within Beijing. With an original focus on off- and on-campus student accommodation, we show that studentification processes are fueled by predilections to live off–campus and the production of student-oriented housing. The significance of our discussion is to assert that less-regulated student lifestyles are reinforcing urban geographies of socio-spatial segregation and are illustrative of the effects of the privatization of housing and land markets in China. The concept of studentification is pivotal to theorize how cross-cutting relations between the expansion of higher education and marketization of housing markets are reshaping Chinese cities to become more exclusionary, and comparative to other geographies of global studentification.