The market formation of private sector, purpose built student accommodation in Sheffield 2000–2019

Abstract

There has been increasing academic interest shown in the evolving market maturity of the private sector, purpose built student accommodation (PBSA) market and its role in supporting the massification of higher education in the UK and elsewhere. This paper focuses on the evolution of the private sector PBSA market in Sheffield, UK, whose material impact upon central Sheffield in the first two decades of the twenty‐first century to both the built environment and socio‐spatial structure of the central city has been transformational. It is asserted that these changes in Sheffield reflect the wider growth dynamics and impact of private sector PBSAs on similar locales across the UK. A fundamental conceptualisation of the paper is that government higher education policy, and the differential interpretation of that policy by higher education institutions, and the enabling planning frameworks of local authorities, have created the market for private sector PBSA. The private sector PBSA market in Sheffield, as elsewhere, has been increasingly drawn into a global financialised framework that positions PBSAs as assets that are enabling of abstracted extraction of value in a knowable and predictable way. The paper foregrounds how this process embeds within a de‐industrialised, secondary city such as Sheffield a deeper connectivity to the global financial economy through not only inflows of investment capital but outflows of revenue to private sector PBSA investors.