‘University’ is Home
John Friedmann, UCLA

I officially retired from UCLA’s Department of Urban Planning in 1976. My wife, Leonie Sandercock, who had been an adjunct professor in the same department, is Australian, and she decided to take up a full-time position at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Melbourne. (After a couple of years, she would switch to the University of Melbourne). Now it was my turn to follow her wherever her work would take her.

Many would regard Melbourne as Australia’s cultural capital, with Sydney being the prime commercial city. It was not difficult to get fully adjusted into its cultural life, and for the five years we were there, we maintained a regular evening “salon” where some of Melbourne’s notables would gather to talk about art, poetry, and other subjects of interest.

At both university institutions where Leonie taught in Melbourne, I participated as an adjunct, doing some teaching, including running a voluntary seminar for master’s by research students and aspiring PhDs to get their proposals in shape. My other activity was organizing a Pacific Rim urban research network. Although we had no money, we did succeed in having four annual meetings respectively in Osaka, Taipei, Hong Kong, and of course Melbourne. My own interests in Asia’s urbanization were peaked by this movable feast and ultimately led me to take up a serious study of China.

But Leonie wanted to return to some place closer to what she perceived as the center of the world, and when the opportunity arose, she accepted a position as professor in the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. We have been living here since 2001. Again, it was quite easy to become accustomed to this beautiful city where I now live. I was thankful to receive an honorary appointment at UBC, and made myself sufficiently useful to my new department so that they now carry me on their roster as a full-time faculty member.

These past six years have been quite extraordinary in terms of my own productive life with two books published and a slew of longer essays on such subjects as planning cultures and the history of place and place-making in the cities of China. We have also bought a weekend and summer home on nearby Orcas Island, one of the gems in the (American) San Juans.

Having lived in many countries (and cities) throughout my life, I’ve decided that, after all, my real home is the university and its traditions. I have been involved with university life for 60 years and over a century, if I think of my father, who was a professor like myself. I have no desire to look for greener pastures. The university is my home. But each time I move, it’s been a challenge to adapt to a new environment, and that keeps me young.

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