This is a repost of an article I co-authored with Professor Peter Tregear OAM, inaugural Director of Little Hall, in the trade journal for the student accommodation industry in this region, called Student Accommodation, which is published by the Asia Pacific Student Accommodation Association (APSAA). The piece (pictured below) was first published in June 2021 and is available here.
Little Hall, Big Futures
“[W]hat we hope to do here is to build a true academic community, integrating Little Hall into the core fabric of the University — not just as a building, but as a group of students, leaders, and professionals whose journey can be traced back to the same common beginning.”
So said Joshua, a first-year resident of The University of Melbourne’s newest residential hall, Little Hall, at its official opening in May this year. Although he has only been on campus and in residence for two months, he captured the essence of what Little Hall has set out to do with more clarity and fewer words than many of us might ever hope to.
Little Hall is indeed much more than just another student hall of residence. Taking its first students in February this year, it is intended to be a premium and distinctively new style of student accommodation. Part of a remarkable integrated vision and $30 million gift to the University of Melbourne by philanthropists Paul Little and Jane Hansen, it considerably enhances the University’s capacity to support and nurture students who are moving to Melbourne for study and who would benefit from living in an academically enriched community of their peers.
Containing some 20,000sqm of top-quality and varied spaces for student living, including 669 rooms, study centre, theatre, gymnasium, rooftop gardens spread over 15-stories, Little Hall sets a new benchmark in quality student accommodation.
However the most interesting, if not disruptive, thing about Little Hall may be its character as one of the first ‘hybrid’ residences, that spans the traditional boundaries of purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA) and the older, established residential colleges.
Until now, most professionally-managed student residences in Australia have been loosely grouped into three categories: residential colleges, university-run residences, and PBSA. These categories have helped us to do the quick, rough-cut sensemaking task of breaking down the full spectrum of student accommodation into a few types – a useful mental shortcut – which has been increasingly necessary as the sector has expanded over the last 10-15 years.
But their apparent usefulness over this period does not make these categories the best – or for that matter, a very good – basis for sorting student accommodation facilities into different types. Like other industries at different times, this taxonomy may be about to break down as we continue to rethink what integrated living and learning should look like in the future.
Little Hall cannot be properly classified under this system. To be sure, it is a University-controlled operation, and a modern a facility but it also has many of the hallmark features of a residential college, including dedicated academic support – which begs the question: does it belong in all three categories? Or is it an entirely new one?
A quick look how our existing categories arose reveals that they have more to do with the historical patterns of student accommodation financing and development than their ultimate purpose, goals, facilities, operating models, or cultures (for an excellent recap of the history of the sector, see: From Colleges to Commercial Investment: challenge, change and compromise in the provision of Australian university residence 1856-2016, by Dr Ian Walker, available here).
Now there is at least one major category-breaker live and operating in system (and likely, already several other residences which are similarly hard-to-categorise, such as the new Bruce Hall at ANU), and in the shadow of the shocks we have all had to absorb in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, maybe now is an opportune moment to rethink — and, like Little Hall itself, re-envision – how we think about student accommodation in Australia.
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