It is very interesting that there are so few universities located in rural areas...why is that beyond the obvious that more people are centered around cities?
I want to suggest we need to develop a new form of university for all people. One that offers anyone, of any age from toddler to pensioner to have lifelong access to resources to inform, challenge and develop their skills, knowledge understanding and their resilience. At the moment, universities are elite places, they remain the places of the few, and not of the many, they remain the places where people spend a little time and then move on, they remain in the main, peripheral to most people's lives. Yet they could be a way of thinking about future living, they could be places where people can meet and think together, they could be places that inform and provide the possibility for people to pass on skills and practice new things. The local university could be a way of re-thinking how we re-connect school to community. Instead of school, we could all be part of the local university, it could be truly universal.
Instead of being preoccupied with the university as a building, let's think of the university as a way of combining ideas - people - and problems and re-defining the university as a place of learning again that serves people for their lifetime of learning, it could easily play a central part in forming the renaissance of sustainable communities.
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