At Queen’s University in Kingston, "homecoming" is synonymous with "riot," "burning car" and "beer bottle to the face," but city and university officials in Ottawa didn’t break a sweat over the University of Ottawa’s homecoming last weekend.
Pretty impressive for a city that hosts more than 55,000 post-secondary students.
The relationship between town and gown, a city and the university it houses, is often tumultuous and sometimes disastrous.
Ottawa, however, has managed the near-impossible: relative peace.
In the week leading up to the University of Ottawa’s homecoming, Rideau-Vanier Coun. Georges Bédard maintained that Ottawa’s students have not caused much of a problem for residents, and likely never will.
Bedard’s riding includes Sandy Hill, the neighbourhood surrounding the University of Ottawa.
“If you’re away from home and you move into a neighbourhood, it becomes your home,” Bédard said. “Why would you riot where you live?”
But last November in the city of Kingston, Queen’s University cancelled its annual fall homecoming weekend in an attempt to curb the drunken Aberdeen Street party that coincides with the event each year.
The off-campus party has become a public-relations nightmare for the school since 2005, when a car was overturned and torched amid the revelry.
Approximately 6,000 people attended the street party that year, with similar numbers each year since.
Partiers have also come face-to-face with police, with 138 arrested last year on a variety of drinking-related charges.
But cancelling homecoming just added fuel to the car fire.
By last week, nearly 6,000 students and alumni had joined the Facebook event titled “Queen’s Homecoming 2009: Let’s Go Anyway!” and Kingston officials were scrambling to prepare for the risk of another Aberdeen fiasco.
Kingston is an extreme example, but the city isn’t alone in its town-gown woes.
More than 150 communities in Canada are home to universities and colleges.
Residents in these communities often report incidents related to their personal security, the value of their property, and the integrity of their neighbourhoods.
The key to avoiding these incidents and keeping tensions low may be as simple as dispersion. Many university cities such as Kingston, Hamilton and Halifax have a large off-campus population crammed into a single, small residential area, or a "student ghetto.”
With low housing standards and high rent prices feeding their frustration, students become a unified, disgruntled force.
The “ghettoization” of the area drives away remaining families from the neighbourhood and student-resident tension can grow to the point that students feel like they own that particular piece of the city while residents just want the students out.
Add alcohol into the equation and riotous behaviour seems not just possible, but probable.
Town-gown experts such as Mary Somers, a former senior communications advisor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, agree that student ghettos are the root of tensions between students and residents.
But they can be difficult to avoid, especially as a university campus expands into a residential neighbourhood.
“It’s hard to know where the campus ends and the neighbourhood begins,” Somers said. “The backs of some buildings run smack into people’s backyards.”
Ottawa, thanks in part to urban sprawl and smart city planning, has largely managed to avoid student ghettos. Many families call Sandy Hill "home," and students tend to live throughout the city and commute to school.
These mixed neighbourhoods are safer, more active, and form communities in which students become integrated and active members.
However, that doesn’t mean they won’t occasionally act out.
The unavoidable truth is that many university students get drunk, get loud and get rowdy. Of course, the same can be said for other city residents.
But friction forms when students are defined by these episodic events. And how a city deals with instances of student misbehavior can drastically affect student-resident relations.
Bédard co-ordinates a yearly September bylaw enforcement crackdown in Sandy Hill to make behaviour expectations clear to students from the start.The zero-tolerance policy delivers the message that Sandy Hill is a neighbourhood, not simply an extension of the campus.
Bédard says students and residents live side-by-side mostly without incident for the remainder of the school year.
Michael Fox, a geography professor at Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B., and a town-gown scholar, says that enforcement overkill and media frenzies cause the kind of student hostility that can lead to riots.
“When students are told that they’re animals, they tend not to behave very well,” Fox said. “An ‘us versus them’ mentality develops.”
When Carleton University’s women’s soccer team was suspended for incidents relating to rookie initiation, the media took notice but didn’t label Carleton students as drunks.
The media in Kingston, however, have been criticized for over-reporting on negative student behaviour and characterizing Queen’s students as a privileged, liquored few.
Perhaps in Ottawa, a city boasting the highest number of people with a post-secondary education in Canada, residents are simply more welcoming to their student neighbours.
Whatever the reason, when homecoming can come and go without notice, or arson, both town and gown should be confident that they are doing something right.