The Socio-Spatial Production of Campus Publicness: Integrating Space Syntax, Spatial Affordances, and Student-Led Practices

Universities operate beyond their conventional roles of education and research, functioning as socio-spatial environments, where public life is continuously produced through everyday interactions and student-led practices. While previous studies have examined campus spatial configuration, public space or student practices separately, less attention has been paid to how spatial configuration, relational spatial affordances, and student-led practices interact within the same analytical perspective. This gap is particularly relevant to inner-city campuses, where university spaces are closely embedded in the surrounding urban fabric and where student collective life unfolds across both formal and informal spatial settings. Addressing this gap, this study investigates the role of student-led collective practices between the North and South campuses of Bahçeşehir University (BAU), an inner-city university located in Beşiktaş, İstanbul. The study adopts a mixed-methods approach that integrates Space Syntax analysis (Angular Segment Analysis and Visibility Graph Analysis), spatial and behavioral observations, an affordance-based analysis of campus spaces, and semi-structured interviews with 16 students from six student clubs. This analytical framework enables configurational potentials for movement, visibility, and co-presence with the physical, temporal, and institutional conditions of space use and students’ repeated collective practices. The findings demonstrate that campus publicness cannot be explained by spatial configuration alone. Instead, different forms of collective practice are associated with different combinations of configurational accessibility, visibility, material conditions, temporal availability, and institutional access. Visible and accessible in-between spaces such as gardens, alleys, entrance areas, and lounges support informal encounters and public-facing activities, while more enclosed and institutionally accessible spaces, such as reserved classrooms, provide conditions for prolonged rehearsals and repeated collective production. Artistic co-production emerged among the participating clubs as one recurring form of collective practice through which students use and adapt campus spaces. The study conceptualizes these relationships as a form of specialized campus publicness: an interest-based and institutionally bounded form of collective public life that develops through repeated student practices. By integrating configurational analysis, relational affordances with the social and collective dimensions of student-led practices, the study contributes to campus urbanism and public-space research by showing that campus publicness emerges through the interaction of spatial potentials, student practices, and the temporal and institutional conditions under which spaces become available for collective use.