I see that Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class has been given a tenth anniversary re-release. This book was enormously influential in re-casting regional economic development with an urban-hipster ethos. “Downtowns are the bomb,” the argument went. “Do whatever you can to get as many talented people as you can to knock up against each other in a dense urban setting and economic growth will occur like magic.” Part Alfred Marshall, part Jane Jacobs, this argument struck a chord with the right-on crowd, especially in universities. All of a sudden, the thing to do in higher education was to have some kind of major urban tech-transfer place, attracting both scientifics and creatives. Hence MaRS. Hence all that incredibly cool stuff Ryerson is doing these days, creating tech incubators and buying up the scuzzy parts of Yonge Street.

In fact, this is all now so de rigeur that it is almost completely forgotten how entirely antithetical all of it is to the major traditions of higher education.

From the earliest times, universities were “cities apart,” deliberately separated from the world at large so as to ensure space for contemplation. In Europe, universities were separated from their surrounding cities by a wall. In the U.S., many universities were founded in rural idylls, away from the hurly burly of city life (Exhibit A: Dartmouth). So prevalent was the notion of “apartness” as a determinant of erudition that when it came time to build real “Science Cities” after World War II, they did so not in downtowns, but out in suburbs like Palo Alto, Boston’s Route 128 and the North Carolina Research Triangle.

Why the ‘burbs? Partly it was because at the time that’s where the intellectual elite who were staffing these Science Cities liked to live. But also, it was because that was where land was cheapest. And that’s the problem with these new hyper-urban incubator zones. You can buy a lot more economic growth for your dollar in the ‘burbs than you can downtown. As interesting and invigorating as MaRS and the Ryerson property-spree are, you have to wonder: can all those spin-offs really thrive while paying downtown Toronto rents? The availability and cost of land adjacent to the university matters when it comes to tech transfer. In fact, it might in fact be a pretty good long-term predictor of a school’s innovation potential. That’s why universities like UBC, U Alberta and U Saskatchewan may have some serious advantages in the innovation game going forward.

The open, urban university is a greater historical anomaly than the secluded campus at the edge of town, for economic reasons as well as cultural ones. Don’t bet on urban campuses being permanently fashionable.