International students as urban agents: International education and urban transformation in Auckland, New Zealand

Abstract

This paper discusses connections between the internationalisation of education, and in particular the growth in international students, and processes of urban transformation. The research is centred in Auckland, New Zealand, a city where the number of international students has grown rapidly over the last decade leading to significant impacts on the urban form and experience of the city’s CBD. This includes growth in educational services such as language schools and other private training establishments, new residential geographies characterised by low-cost and low-quality high-rise developments, and new ethnic economies of food, service and entertainment businesses that explicitly target international students. The paper draws on research with South Korean international students and a range of secondary materials to interrogate the connections between student mobilities and changing urban form. In doing so the paper contributes to emerging scholarship on student geographies and the role of students as urban agents through the inclusion of an international dimension that has largely been absent in the extant literature. The findings illustrate that while international students themselves clearly play a significant role in the transformation of urban spaces their influence cannot easily be separated from the contribution of a range of other actors including educational businesses, property developers, transnational migrants and local and national state actors.