With the creative villa, make a university at the heart of the city – Liberation

In Avignon, The creative villa proposes to confront scientific, educational and artistic knowledge to create new knowledge. An event that Release is a partner.

Universities experience multiple transitions which put them in tension at all levels, from their foundations to the summits of their scientific and societal ambitions.

Historically carried by a universalist vocation, they have developed their activities on a large thematic and disciplinary spectrum. A spectral width in accordance with the idea that universities have a secular mission of development of knowledge, all thematic combined, and that there is no need to favor a discipline rather than another.

This model shows its limits in the face of a scientific and socio-economic reality which has notably changed in recent decades. To exist in an international landscape that has become very competitive, it is now essential to assert a differentiating scientific signature and to strengthen its capacity to actually produce a search for world rank on its own scientific specialties. This movement leads to a less universalist thematic concentration, but scientifically and economically much more effective.

The evolution of the missions entrusted to universities further increases this identity tension. Beyond the production and transmission of knowledge, they are now engaged in economic development, cultural policies, local attractiveness. They have a permanent dialogue with society and must meet the expectations of a worried but demanding youth, which expects a lot from science.

The identity tension would be more sustainable in an economic context itself more relaxed, but the establishments must now rethink their economic model-or even establish a model that did not really have to be when the public power subvented their needs without asking too many questions. Financial pressure is now omnipresent and it has naturally resulted in the objective of promoting real estate assets in establishments that had its potential. If the first function of universities is to produce science and transmit it, the commercial exploitation of the building is a secondary activity that requires new expertise and new tools.

These questions are shared by all universities but they arise with a particular intensity for the smallest of them. The scientific signature is, for these establishments, an existential necessity in a globalized research environment. Their role in the territories is major but, if their size gives them a particular plasticity, it also exposes them to economic hazards and limits their capacity to carry out a change of model however necessary.

It is in this context that the creative villa takes on its full meaning.

Exceptional university location in a historical and cultural environment which is just as much, it provides an original and ambitious response to these major challenges that the university must take up.

The villa implants, in a magnificently rehabilitated heritage place by Alfonso Femia, a model of public-private hybridization that guarantees the economic viability of the structure.

A great catalyst of a booming ecosystem in the field of culture and creative industries, it places the University at the heart of the policies of economic, cultural and scientific development of its territory.

A space open to all audiences, it offers a rich artistic and scientific program, in a framework and a mix stimulating the renewal of the Dialogue Science, Arts and Society.

Place of science, place of creativity, place of innovation, place of life … The creative villa constitutes the first embodiment of an unprecedented model where the university is re-invented in the heart of the city.