The article contributes to the debate that links student geographies with urban change. It has been argued that students reshape urban geographies through the creation of distinctive "student areas." However, while the literature has substantially advanced our understanding of students' role in urban change, it has often done so focusing on one specific component (e.g., accommodation or leisure) and one specific city or neighborhood. Therefore, we aim to nuance the debate over student geographies in cities. To this end, we use the "studentscapes" framework and propose a concurrent examination of students' educational, residential, and leisure activities distributed in the urban space of Lodz, Poland, and Turin, Italy. We show that the presence of higher education students plays a role in the multifaceted and dynamic restructuring of Lodz and Turin as they transition from industrial to post-industrial economies. We also claim that the dichotomous distinction between "student" and "non-student" neighborhoods might miss the wide range of configurations of students' activities in urban settings.

Universities have progressively seen a change in their role as actors in the transformation of cities, with the growth of student populations and related studentification processes that are seen both as drivers of development and causes of negative externalities. What risks being overshadowed, however, is the complex array of interests and agencies that are involved. The aim of the article is, thus, to explore the production of geographies of exclusion that cannot be simply linked to the negative impacts directly exerted by the increased pressure of students' concentrations on specific neighbourhoods. They can also be related to the specific form that urban development strategies driven by higher education institutions takes in post‐industrial cities. The case of Turin, Italy, shows that a dominant narrative on the role of universities has triggered various stakeholders' strategic orientation and that, therefore, variegated transformations can be interpreted as the effects of capital investments that materialise in university‐related ‘fixes’.