Making Markets, Transforming Student Cities: The Rise of Purpose-Built Student Accommodation in Germany and the Netherlands

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Jana Maria Kleibert
• Subject Area: Human Geography
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 549498223

In many cities around the world, there is a lack of affordable student housing. This presents a pressing social problem of equity and access to higher education in cities with tight housing markets. Against this backdrop, in countries such as Canada, Australia or the United Kingdom, we are seeing an increase of private investment in profit-oriented purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA) that constitute an own asset class. Recently, we can also observe a rise of privately developed, high-cost student accommodation in continental European student cities. As academic research has so far mainly focused on single case studies in the Anglophone context, there has been a lack of comparative analysis of the expansion of this phenomenon to continental European cities and thus an understanding that goes beyond the traditionally more neoliberalised and financialised housing markets. Following on from this research gap, the research project investigates the development of profit-oriented PBSA in Germany and the Netherlands from an economic and urban geographic perspective. The key question this project aims to answer is: Why do we see a rise of PBSA providers in Germany and the Netherlands and how do they transform cities? Employing an economic and urban geographic lens, the research reveals the scope, scale and patterns of profit-oriented PBSA development and its organizational logics in the European context, before looking at geographical variations at different spatial scales in two European countries. In doing so, we explore the key actors enabling and inhibiting the rise of exclusive student housing supply in several cities and show how demand for PBSA spaces is created and how this transforms student cities. The research employs a relational-comparative research design that reveals both the (transnational) networks as well as the place-based urban politics that together create the spaces of profit-oriented PBSA. In doing so, this research will take a closer look at the “PBSA complex” by analysing the linkages between PBSA developers, operators, investors/owners, and other actors like universities, urban planners, politicians/governments, students/consumers, credit institutions, digital platforms, etc. This will help to understand, how, where and why profit-oriented PBSAs emerge, who benefits from these developments and what conflicts and contradictions arise from them. The research findings will moreover contribute to academic debates on the changing geographies of globalisation, the variegated financialisation of student housing, and the future of student cities.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants