An aerial view of the Beijing Film Academy's campus in Huairou district on the outskirts of the city.

Over the past decade, Beijing has continuously optimized the layout of its universities and colleges by moving them from central districts to the city's outskirts.

The initiative is part of the city's efforts to accelerate the process of relocating non-capital functions out of the downtown area and promoting the coordinated development of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region.

Universities such as Beijing Film Academy, Beijing Information Science and Technology University and Beijing Technology and Business University have built new campuses in Huairou, Changping and Fangshan districts.

"The new campus is bigger than I expected," said Mu Aixing, a junior student from the School of Law of Beijing Technology and Business University. "We probably do not need to jostle for seats in the study room anymore."

Due to limited space, the university's old campus at Fucheng Road in Haidian district faces challenges such as a shortage of classrooms, crowded dormitories, and queuing for eating and bathing, which have seriously hindered the high-quality development of the university.

To change the situation, the university seized the opportunity of the development of Liangxiang University Town in Fangshan in 2001, and started to build its new campus there.

In 2004, the first phase of the project was completed and put into use, welcoming more than 7,000 students. The new campus consists of 16 teaching buildings, 10 student dormitory buildings and three building complexes, which can meet the living and teaching needs of nearly 10,000 teachers and students, said Ji Tao, head of the university's campus construction department.

However, since many students still studied and lived at the old campus at that time, commuting became the most urgent issue to be solved for teachers, because it took nearly one hour to get to the new campus by bus. The Fangshan subway line did not open until December 2010.

In 2017, the university decided to make the Liangxiang campus its main campus, and began to work on a second construction phase. It plans to move the vast majority of the students to the new campus by 2024.

Moreover, the university has built public rental housing in the north of the new campus for teachers who have no apartments in Fangshan. Yue Pengpeng, an associate professor of finance, is one of them.

"I now usually walk to the university to have breakfast. After finishing my work, I sometimes invite colleagues who live nearby to chat at home in the evening," Yue said.

"My happiness has been greatly improved since I moved into the new apartment," he added.

In the northeast of the campus, four teaching buildings form the shape of a fan around Qiuzhi Square. They are equipped with laboratories, offices and study rooms. Each building is occupied by a school, including the school of economics and school of mathematics and statistics.

In the building, "each graduate student has an independent room to complete sci-tech research tasks. The equipment has also been updated, and the work efficiency has been greatly improved," said Yang Weijia, a graduate student in mathematics and statistics.

Currently, seven schools have their own teaching buildings. By 2024, a large teaching and research building will be put into operation, housing the school of food and health, school of light industry, school of chemistry and materials engineering, and school of ecology and environment.

When completed, the building will be the largest single building in Liangxiang University Town, with a total construction area of about 71,000 square meters.

This building serves as a major attempt to optimize the functional layout of the university's two campuses, said Huang Xiankai, secretary of the university's Party committee. Also, it is of great significance to expanding the teaching space and promoting the construction of a high-level research-oriented university, he added.

Huang said the university has witnessed tremendous improvement of its teaching environment in Liangxiang during the past two decades. It had finished building 112 smart classrooms by the end of 2022, and the conditions for practical experiments will also be greatly improved in the coming two years.

haonan@chinadaily.com.cn