I also read Christian's post with interest, and was thinking that Canada doesn't have the same focus on college towns. Looking through the list of Canadian college towns from Wikipedia, it looks like I was right about the lack in Western Canada anyway (calling Nelson a college town would be a real stretch)...but I hadn't realized that we had equivalents in the east. (duh!)

A few years ago, I went on a series of business trips and got to visit some of the famous universities in the U.S. -- Princeton, Harvard, MIT, and Stanford -- and it was really eye-opening for a country boy from the prairies. Harvard in particular kind of blew my mind, both for the history of the place and how closely it's integrated with the surrounding town.

Although I was trying to stay positive about my own history as I wandered through those beautiful campuses with amazing architecture and reverent atmosphere, I couldn't shake the grey images of the suburban-industrial campus of my alma mater, the University of Manitoba. It's at least in the city, but totally disconnected from it, and sadly it's mostly a hodge-podge of ugly '70s concrete buildings. Made me wish that I had been able to envision a wider world at 18, rather than choosing the easiest path.

In the early '90s, Kelowna was deciding where to build their new expanded campus (now UBC Okanagan) and ended up planting it out in the boonies north of the city. It's a very nice facility, but the location means that everyone has to drive there, nobody wants to live on campus and it's not at all integrated into the community.