This article will be examining how higher education as a system gets to be impacted by the urban land dynamics of a city where a university is located. The apartheid spatial planning of cities has shaped the current urban university and this has an effect on its provision of student accommodation. This study will use Tinto's student integration theory to demonstrate how the living and learning experiences of students who reside in the off-campus residences of Nelson Mandela University get to be shaped by the property relations of the suburban location of where the university is based. This research shows the implications on how a university can be administratively imagined in a developing country's context where it is underpinned by a city environment that has an inherited reality of land dispossession, violence, spatial isolation, and social injustice along class hierarchies of discrimination.