Builder,broker,beacon and base: Universities as anchor institutions

Abstract

This paper examines universities as anchor institutions in order to contribute to geographies of education and geographies of embeddedness. It is possible to identify four dimensions of anchoring with reference to recent scholarly work: Universities have the capacity to build local community, broker relationships, serve as beacons and operate as a base for community engagement. Consideration of universities as builder, broker, beacon and base highlights the qualified success of some universities in local engagement and offers a conceptual scaffold for reflection on universities’ progressive potential. It also highlights the importance of place-based embeddedness and trans-local flows in analysing complex organisations.

Keywords

anchoring community local universities urban

I Introduction

Anchor institutions are organisations whose purpose, size and durability provide a basis for their benefiting local society. The term became especially popular in the early 2000s to describe the local community engagement work of educational institutions, hospitals and some other organisations, for example, associated with government (Dragicevic, 2015; Fongwa, 2023). There has been a particular rise of scholarly work and public commentary on universities as anchor institutions during the twenty-first century (Birch et al., 2013; Ehlenz, 2016). Notwithstanding this increase in interest, however, there has been little reflection conceptually on how to imagine the anchoring role of universities. This paper addresses this gap through offering a theoretical framework for analysing universities’ role as anchors and documenting the capacity of universities in the twenty-first century to play progressive roles vis-à-vis local communities and via trans-local connections. The paper contributes to geographies of education by highlighting a continued need to examine the contradictions of education, how universities are embedded in localities and universities’ broader-scale links. The paper also contributes to wider research on the embeddedness of complex organisations by simultaneously stressing the need to attend to local place and trans-local flows and encouraging comparative research on organisations’ trans-local engagements.

The remainder of the paper is divided into seven sections. In the next section I introduce geographical work on embeddedness and place, trans-localism and geographies of education. I then introduce the idea of universities as anchor institutions. In the following four sections, I examine different dimensions of universities’ anchoring: building, brokering, acting as a beacon and serving as a base. The final section links the arguments back to wider themes in research on geographies of education and organisations’ embeddedness. The overwhelming majority of the work on universities as anchors has occurred in North America and the UK and this is reflected in the focus of the paper on those regions. However, I also draw on examples from emerging studies in the Global South and highlight how this might be changing our understanding of anchoring.

II Embeddedness, education and universities

During the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, several economic geographers emphasised the importance of understanding how organisations are embedded in local places, with a particular focus on firms and often with a view often to explaining patterns of commercial success and failure (see Amin and Cohendet, 2005). In these studies, scholars typically understood embeddedness as, ‘the social and cultural foundations of economic activity’ (Jones, 2008: 214). In the 2000s, several geographers challenged this focus on embeddedness, arguing for a greater focus on interconnectedness, for example, through the idea of ‘networked embeddedness’ (Hess, 2004). Others debunked the idea of embeddedness itself by arguing that work on this topic over-emphasised the importance of the local in an environment of globalisation, presented the local as fixed, concealed individual actors by treating firms as units and discouraged analysis of power relations (Jones, 2008; see also Amin and Cohendet, 2005). These authors argued for more processual economic geographies that focused to a great extent on discrete practices. This position has in turn been challenged by those that argue for the continued importance of analysing how practices cohere over time into particular economic, social and political formations within places that are nevertheless connected to wider flows of activity (e.g. Brooks et al., 2012; Massey, 2013; Swyngedouw, 1997). For example, Coe et al. (2017) argue that firms operate through effecting a ‘strategic coupling’ wherein they are both embedded in regional or local territorial formations and active within global production networks.

Research on other organisations supports Coe’s et al.’s (2017) emphasis on the need to examine multiple scales in reflecting on complex organisations. For example, Wood et al. (2016) argue that the capacity of retail organisations to balance attention to wider parent company objectives and locally embedded contexts is often critical to the successful replication of economic activity across multiple places. The success of activist networks commonly rests on their attention to local place and capacity to learn trans-locally (Santo and Motagues-Faus (2019). The strategic coupling of local embeddedness and trans-local flows of knowledge and action are also evident in research with networks of grassroots entrepreneurs (Vlasov et al., 2018), industrial clusters (Bellandi and Caloffi, 2008) and municipal governments (Thomas, 2005). Similarly, and outside institutional contexts, work with migrants and displaced peoples often emphasises the importance for individuals of being embedded in a new context and connected via trans-local flows to their home area or other places (see Porst and Sakdapolnak, 2017; Regasa and Lietaert, 2024). This work on migrants also highlights a need to differentiate between different types of embeddedness, for example, economic, social and political (see also Vlasov et al., 2018).

Paralleling this work, geographers of education have emphasised the importance of understanding educational institutions and members of educational institutions with reference to place and broader, multi-scalar flows (e.g. Cheng and Holton, 2019; Waters, 2012). Scholars have shown how universities are typically integrated in the spatial, social, political, economic and cultural transformations of their localities (e.g. Castree, 2016; McNeill, 2024; Meusberger et al., 2018). This is evident in research on universities and social change in Euro-America (Meusberger et al., 2018), ethnographies of the university (Hunter and Abelmann, 2013), universities in the Global South (e.g. Bank et al., 2018; Cheng and Holton, 2019; Waters and Leung, 2017) and universities and urban transformation (e.g. Goddard, 2018; McNeill, 2024; Patel et al., 2015). At the same time, scholars emphasise that universities are entangled in flows of people, ideas and practice across sub-national and national boundaries (Bender, 1988; Waters, 2012; Adriansen et al., 2015; see also Addie, 2017; Brooks and Waters, 2017; Goddard, 2018).

A strong theme in discussion of universities’ simultaneous embeddedness and trans-local connections has been their progressive potential. The idea of higher education having broadly progressive impact was expressed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for example, in the civic university movement in the UK (Goddard et al., 2014; Whyte, 2015), land grant university movement in the US (Mack and Stolarick, 2014), Latin American university movements (McCowan, 2016) and decolonisation movements in Africa and South Asia (Bank et al., 2018; Bundy, 1987; Kapur and Mehta, 2004). Universities’ progressive embeddedness and connections have been expressed via their training local workforces (Bok, 1982) but also in relation to wider action, such as encouraging national development (Meusberger et al., 2018) and promoting global awareness (e.g. Birch et al., 2013).

Several scholars have nevertheless questioned the extent to which universities’ local embeddedness and simultaneous broader action have resulted in progressive outcomes. Universities are sites of power in which privilege is commonly naturalised and reinforced and they have been complicit in colonial projects (Bank et al., 2018; Kapur and Mehta, 2004) authoritarianism (Ignatieff, 2024) and market-centric policies that compound structural disadvantage (e.g. Addie, 2020; Castree, 2016; Wolf-Powers, 2022). Universities may be embedded in elite networks but dis-embedded in relation to the lives of structurally disadvantaged populations in a local area (Wolf-Powers, 2022; cf Porst and Sakdapolnak, 2017).

III Universities as anchor institutions

The contradictions of universities’ work and the related questions around the nature of universities’ embeddedness and trans-localism can be examined with reference to recent research on universities as anchor institutions. Universities are archetypal anchors in some respects. They are frequently named after a place: The identity and reputation of the university and its local area are typically closely intertwined. Moreover, universities depend upon place. A prosperous, peaceful and safe locality is crucial for a university to run effectively, recruit employees and students and draw businesses into partnerships (see Birch et al., 2013; Cox, 2017; Cox and Mair, 1988). Reflecting these points, universities’ efforts to benefit local areas are old. The US government’s land grant university drive in the nineteenth century was founded on that idea of universities promoting local and regional development (Mack and Stolarick, 2014; McDowell, 2003). In the twentieth century in South America, Eastern Europe, Asia and South Africa, governments encouraged universities to transform localities (see Perales Franco and McCowan, 2021; Pugh, 2017). The importance of universities’ local engagement increased particularly notably in mid-twentieth century America, when de-industrialisation, capital flight and a decline in the welfare state precipitated social crises in post-War urban settings. Universities and hospitals – ‘eds and meds’ – entered the vacuum, stimulating growth through purchasing and hiring locally, training local people and promoting local business (Birch et al., 2013; see Taylor et a. 2018 for a critique).

Since the late 1990s, there has been a further rise in discussions of universities as agents of local change, and typically with close reference to the idea of working as an ‘anchor institution’ (see Ehlenz, 2016). Governments have called on universities to revitalise their local communities in places as diverse as the UK (Goddard et al., 2014; Goddard and Vallance, 2013), US (Addie, 2020), Australia (Ruming, 2023), South Africa (Bank et al., 2018), India (Misra and Pugh, 2023), China (Ruoppila and Zhao, 2017) and Brazil (Fioreze and McCowan, 2018). In Cox’s terms (2017), government commonly envisage universities as ‘spaces of engagement’ in the sense of institutions that can connect and collaborate with multiple people and institutions in part through attracting them onto their physical premises. The 2020 statement of then Minister of State for Universities, Science, Research, and Innovation, Chris Skidmore, regarding the UK’s new Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF) is typical:

All our higher education institutions can play an important role in addressing the particular economic and social issues facing different local areas. I encourage you to support universities in understanding more about local issues and priorities (quoted in Johnston, 2022: 5).

In a similar vein, the recent Australian Universities Accord enjoins universities to develop place-based agreements with communities and benchmark their local community engagement (see O’Kane et al., 2024). In the context of funding shortages, university leaders and management often feel under particular pressure to align their strategies to government expectations of universities around local engagement (Attoh et al., 2017; Ruming, 2023).

A caveat should be entered at this point. Governments are also focussing on other scales of engagement. In Australia, the US and Europe, government has pushed universities to forge links across nations. The withdrawal of government funding for universities in many places and related requirement to recruit more actively have also led many institutional leaders to emphasise their universities’ international links. In this context, universities have commonly moved between a tight focus on the ‘local’ and consideration of regional, national and international engagement (see Addie, 2020; Birch et al., 2013; Knight et al., 2021). Resonating with work on ‘network embeddedness’ in economic geography (see Hess, 2004) and the idea of ‘strategic coupling’ (Coe et al., 2017), this has included universities concentrating on trans-local action, for example, where a university has campuses in multiple locations and seeks to contribute to multiple local areas scattered nationally or internationally (see Wray and Tomaney, 2011).

Consideration of universities’ anchor focus in the period since the 1990s, including their attention to trans-local connections, provides a basis for re-evaluating universities’ progressive potential. This requires a more nuanced conceptual understanding of anchoring than is typically provided, however. The orientation of universities and other institutions towards community regeneration in the US in the 1960s led commentators to understand anchoring as revitalisation (Dragicevic, 2015; see also McCowan, 2018). In a typical statement, Dragicevic (2015: 234) defines anchoring as, ‘The intentional deployment of an institution’s geographically bounded assets and economic power to revitalise neighbourhoods where individuals face historic barriers to economic growth and survival’. The idea of universities as engines of local revitalisation is valuable. But Dragicevic’s definition underestimates the breadth of ways in which universities sometimes achieve a progressive impact in their immediate localities and more widely. For example, the notion of revitalisation connotes recovery to a former state, whereas universities may be engaged in building innovative practices. Moreover, a revitalisation lens draws attention away from several of the connotations of the term ‘anchor’. It is possible to identify four dimensions of anchoring through abstracting from recent scholarly work on universities and at the same time reflecting on the idea of anchoring. First, anchor institutions commonly serve as a builder of community, drawing on Dragevic’s (2015) definition. This is often associated with the idea that the area around institutions requires development (see Fongwa, 2023). Second, anchor institutions may broker knowledge and relationships within a local area. Anchor institutions often become curators of people, place and social difference. This conceptualisation of anchoring resonates with the way in which the term anchor is used when people discuss a television ‘news anchor’. Third, anchor institutions may model a better future – they can be a beacon. This notion connects with how the term anchor is used in some North American settings, where a particular superstore is referred to as the anchor store within a shopping mall: The superstore is a draw for people, and it may exemplify new practices and ideas. Finally, an anchor institution may act as a base for surrounding communities. This may occur through local communities visiting a university occasionally or in other ways, for example, via a university serving as a sanctuary. This fourfold structure simultaneously provides a basis for theorising universities as anchors and heightening understanding of the embeddedness and trans-local nature of major organisations more generally (cf Hess, 2004; see also Wood et al., 2016).

IV Builder

Universities are commonly located in marginalised neighbourhoods (see Ehlenz, 2016; Misra and Pugh, 2023). Moreover, since the 1990s, intersecting crises related to climate change, economic restructuring, political authoritarianism and technological transformation have often threatened local communities. Many of the issues of state withdrawal, urban disinvestment and capital flight that characterised post-War America have become increasingly salient (e.g. Ehlenz, 2016). Moreover, governments are often especially keen for universities to play roles as builders (Birch et al., 2013; Misra and Pugh, 2023). Against this background, universities have commonly adopted anchor missions that prioritise building local community, often defined as people and institutions within a few kilometres of a university campus or entity (see Bank et al., 2018; Ehlenz, 2016; Misra and Pugh, 2023). This has occurred in part through universities encouraging research with local impact, especially the building of locally oriented programs. For example, Birmingham University initiated a community researcher scheme that linked members of the community to university expertise and distributed community researchers’ findings to poorer, inner-city wards (O’Farrell et al., 2022). The University of Cape Town’s African Centre for Cities built a Knowledge Transfer Program worked with local government to develop context-relevant knowledge of sustainability issues and strategic partnerships with policymakers (Patel et al., 2015). Such efforts to build local capabilities via research often enrol communities historically marginalised by university activity (Benneworth, 2012). For example, intercultural universities in Mexico have integrated indigenous people into research thereby challenging dominant knowledge systems and facilitating indigenous recognition (Oyarzún et al., 2017).

Universities have also developed their anchor mission through education programs. For example, Loyola College in Chicago developed ‘hyper-local community-based learning’ (Haarman and Green, 2023: 211). These curricula used knowledge of the university’s immediate locality to build critical pedagogies. Similarly, the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative worked with local communities to provide information about the physical environment and development issues (Birch et al., 2013). Some urban universities are also exploring how students can become more involved in translating learning into locally relevant materials, and the ability to teach community members about a subject can be a means of testing students’ learning (Schafran, 2015). Swaraj University in India has built local understanding among university members and the wider community by co-developing place-based learning that foregrounds rural and indigenous histories of knowledge (Kothiyal, 2018). The development of extra- and co-curricular activity may be similarly important. Universities’ sports programs commonly draw the university and community together in ways that facilitate cross-learning (Clopton and Finch, 2011).

Universities have also oriented their broader operations towards local capability building. Since the mid-1990s, the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) has aimed to use its financial, organisational and human capital to improve its immediate neighbourhood (see Ehlenz, 2016; Zelizer, 2011). This included efforts to hire and purchase locally, improve services, help schools, develop housing and engage in community assistance (Ehlenz, 2016; see Etienne, 2012; Wolf-Powers, 2022 for critiques). This example is more broadly indicative. Since 2000, universities across the world have commonly enhanced local services (Cantor et al., 2013; Misra and Pugh, 2023), used their hiring power to improve local communities (Birch et al., 2013), mandated that a percentage of annual purchasing be local (Dubb and Hodges, 2012), assisted local schools and school districts (Ehlenz, 2016) and invested in housing development, for example, in areas abandoned by the private market (see Garton, 2021, 2023). Reflecting awareness of such initiatives and the broader role that universities are playing in their urban areas, governments have encouraged universities to adopt roles historically associated with planning agencies, such as the development of city plans and community consultation (Ruming, 2023; see also Dixon and Roche, 2005).

Despite the growing evidence of universities’ success in local engagement, however, several scholars have argued that the impact of universities’ work as builders is limited or counterproductive (see Addie, 2020; Goddard, 2018). Anchoring missions to revitalise communities may unwittingly erode some of the goals of universities, such as basic research (Castree, 2016), autonomy (Ignatieff, 2024), the rhythms of good scholarship (Mountz et al., 2015) or the capacity of universities to cater for their own staff and students (see O’Farrell, 2022). In addition, university leadership may not demonstrate a sustained commitment to anchoring (Tomaney and Wray, 2011). Others question whether universities do impact local communities in positive ways (e.g. Baldwin, 2021; Bose, 2015; Wolf-Powers, 2022). For example, Etienne (2012) and Wolf-Powers (2022) argue that UPenn has had a divisive impact in Philadelphia and failed to assist poor Black and Latino residents, in particular. Baldwin (2021) develops these ideas, arguing that, through accumulating capital, US universities commonly have the effect of increasing property taxes, which undermines local livelihoods. Baldwin also argues that universities develop discriminatory campus police forces, pay low wages, capitalise on students as captive markets for food outlets and retailers, take advantage of tax breaks and use their financial weight to extract profits from local housing markets (see also Harvey, 2018; Rich and Tsitsos, 2018). Much recent research has concentrated on the connections between universities and the casualisation of labour (Loveday, 2018). Scholars have also focused especially on US and European universities’ adverse impact on housing markets as reflected in recent work on gentrification (e.g. Chatterton, 2010; Goddard and Vallance, 2013), studentification (e.g. Revington and August, 2020) and community division (Munro and Livingston, 2012; but see also Revington, 2022). Recent research in the Global South provides some complementary evidence in relation to universities pernicious impact on local communities (e.g. Bank et al., 2018; He, 2015; Malet Calvo, 2018). For example, Bank et al. (2018) note that several universities in South Africa have excluded or exploited marginalised sections of urban society. Jeffrey (2010) argues that a north Indian university has enriched a local elite, embedded local corruption and politicised communities. In these studies, universities’ reproduction of inequalities is powerfully expressed in the manner in which they spatially exclude communities either from universities or from opportunities and resources within universities.

Notwithstanding these points, many analyses of the urban regeneration efforts of North American universities report that poorer communities have gained from universities’ efforts, including in Durham (Ehlenz, 2016, 2021), Syracuse (Cantor et al., 2013) and Philadelphia (Ehlenz, 2016), and often in ways that are reflected in the landscape. For example, Ehlenz’s (2021) analysis of census data for University City in West Philadelphia between 1990s and 2010 suggests that UPenn’s anchor drive from the mid-1990s onwards increased public safety, lowered crime, improved the quality of local schooling, fostered economic development and resulted in housing investments that benefited a broad set of community members, even if it failed to address urban poverty comprehensively. In addition, Ehlenz (2016) argues that UPenn did not increase gentrification. There is similar evidence of universities progressive impact on local communities based upon an embeddedness in the lives of community members in South Africa (see Bank et al., 2018), the UK (e.g. Goddard et al., 2014), China (Ruoppila and Zhao, 2017), India (Misra and Pugh, 2023), Brazil (McCowan, 2018) and Australia (Ruming, 2023).

As work on embeddedness points out, it is important to understand the multiple personnel and complex practices that are bundled together when scholars refer to a ‘university’ of ‘firm’ (see Jones, 2008). While leadership is often key to the success of university anchor initiatives (see Birch et al., 2013), the capacity for universities to engender progressive socio-spatial change often emerges especially strongly in studies of staff and student contributions to building local capabilities. Misra and Pugh (2023: 2572) argue that academic staff in the Indian locations that they studied felt a strong commitment to place – a ‘motivation [to engage with the region] came from inside’. Their activity was central to the progressive impact of their universities (see also Chatterton et al., 2018; Ehlenz, 2016). In addition, students commonly develop the anchor objectives of universities, and in ways that may diverge from those of the university at large (see Holloway and Jons, 2012), for example, via volunteering opportunities (Jones, 2011), student political engagement (Martelli and Garalytė, 2019) or everyday practices (Lukose, 2022). This was especially apparent in the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa where students’ repeated engagements with local communities was important in challenging colonial social and spatial dominance (Bank et al., 2018; Bundy, 1987) and in provincial India, where students joined with local community members to oppose local corruption in the mid-2000s (Jeffrey, 2010).

V Broker

A TV anchor is customarily involved in assembling, evaluating and representing materials and moderating relationships between people. This idea stands up well for understanding other aspects of universities’ embeddedness in societies. As non-state, non-corporate entities, characterised by cultures of peer review, universities in democratic societies curate knowledge better than do most other institutions (Pielke, 2007; Schafran, 2015). Several authors contest this point, noting a decline in universities’ capacity to protect academic freedom in some jurisdictions, for example, with reference to ideas of censorship and deplatforming (Kumar, 2025; see also Castree, 2016; Ignatieff, 2024). However, the increasing emergence of debates about universities and academic freedom have often encouraged members of universities to reflect to a greater extent on their institutions’ role in public debate (see Schafran, 2015). Democratic backsliding in many countries has simultaneously increased the importance of universities’ potential brokerage roles (Pielke, 2007). Universities’ curatorial capacity is reflected in the capacity of universities to orchestrate educational materials in ways that combine university and community knowledge. For example, UPenn has developed a wide range of syllabi that combine staff and community knowledge (see Zelizer, 2011). Universities’ curatorial capacities are also reflected in how they use new technologies in relation to education and research. They may serve as ‘a central point in the aggregation, distribution, and simultaneous critique of urban media’ (Schafran, 2015: 217).

In the context of their education, research and broader operations, universities also frequently exhibit a particular capacity to broker and curate relationships between people (see Goddard, 2018; Schafran, 2015). For example, Duke University built a diverse range of community partnerships to support its work in revitalising Durham town (Ehlenz, 2016). Such action often entails creating imaginative new connections across social boundaries. For example, in the US, several universities have developed ‘age-friendly campus’ initiatives that have entailed encouraging older people to visit or live on campus. Through offering older people opportunities to reside within their boundaries, universities may foster inter-generational collaboration, counter ageism, develop co-mentoring opportunities and develop broader forms of embeddedness in society (Montepare and Brown, 2022; Montepare et al., 2020). In addition, universities are currently seeking ways of integrating carers into university educational programs in order to widen access to education and create opportunities for diverse social engagement among students (see Larkin and Kubiak, 2021).

Universities may also be mediators of social conflicts. This may occur through formal programs that are focused on conflict resolution and mediation or through universities’ efforts to provide venues and training for staff and students that allow them to engage in debate (e.g. Schafran, 2015), build respectful relationships with communities (Ehlenz, 2021) and embody a particular form of what Pielke (2007) terms ‘honest brokerage’ wherein university researchers widen understanding of policy choices and their implications. Notwithstanding critiques of universities’ failure to address structural disadvantage (Baldwin, 2021), universities’ brokering work also often focuses on social inequalities. For example, the University of Minnesota re-imagined construction in their region by building relationships with minority- or women-owned construction companies (Conner, 2021). Universities brokering work also commonly focuses on issues of respect. For example, Leeds University developed new forms of co-production based upon ethics of trust, openness and respect between university and non-university participants (Chatterton et al., 2018). The focus on respect and sustained interaction is also evident in the community universities that have been established in Southern Brazil (McCowan, 2016). These institutions emerged out of community organising. The universities themselves reflect the work and achievements of local communities. In addition, once constituted as centres of education and research, the community universities maintained their embeddedness through curricula that enhanced local knowledge and by sustaining a sense of care, empathy and mutual belonging.

Paralleling wider work on successful firms, retail organisations and activist networks, for example, universities engaged in brokerage often develop links with other institutions in ways that support trans-local learning (cf Santo and Moragues-Faus, 2019; Vlasov et al., 2018). In North America, the Cleveland Circle Initiative, the Tacoma Anchor Collective and the Toronto Anchor Collective involved universities collaborating with other institutions to apply learnings regarding engagement with ‘their’ localities in conversations across space. In many of these cases, universities form links not only with similar institutions, such as local government organisations that have parallel anchor missions, but also unlike bodies, for example, First Nations groups, unions and activists (e.g. see Ivancheva, 2023). This trans-localism often occurs across regional boundaries to form country-wide and international anchor collectives. Anchor collaboratives such as the UK Anchor Collective and the Enlight Alliance in Europe discuss differences and similarities between the work of their constituent institutions and opportunities for collaboration. Such international trans-local alliance building is exemplified in the Ecoversity Network, a global alliance of learning places and practitioners that seek to reimagine higher education and its relationship to community and place (see Hopkinson, 2010). The Ecoversity Network focuses on anchoring through regular meetings, idea sharing and collaborative cultural practices across unlike institutions (Hopkinson, 2010; see also Schafran, 2015).

VI Beacon

Universities also work as beacons. This is evident in two ways. First, they sometimes prefigure new futures in the sense of modelling in the present the ways of relating to local communities that they wish to see generalised in the future (see Boggs, 1977; Jeffrey and Dyson, 2021). The rise of the idea of prefiguration externally and within institutions is an important context for institutions’ increasing propensity to play beacon roles (see Yates, 2021). Second, the term beacon can refer to an entity that exerts a magnetic force. In anchoring, universities can draw people into their site, acting as a ‘space of engagement’ (Cox, 2017). These two senses of beacon are intrinsically linked. Prefigurative action depends upon garnering attention. Likewise, the act of brokering and developing different ways to model progressive futures are intimately connected. Brokering draws the university into conversations that provide part of the basis for adjudicating on how to serve as beacon.

Scholars working on prefigurative action typically emphasise that this form of practice does not involve following a blueprint (Jeffrey and Dyson, 2021). Universities’ work as beacons is often experimental. They commonly develop schemes and practices – for example, ways of engaging with technology or forms of community engagement – that are open to revision. While other anchor institutions also develop consciously tendential efforts to model future change, as evident, for example, in how local governments craft pilot projects, an experimental ethic is often especially apparent in how universities work as beacons of change. Recent work on ‘living labs’ is especially indicative (see Evans et al., 2015). Living labs employ the built and human infrastructure of institutions to test ways of addressing human and environmental challenges, often with a particular focus on sustainability. Living labs are often embedded in research and teaching programs but provide points of interest and participation for individuals and institutions outside universities. Living labs may be oriented towards renewing aspects of a universities’ immediate setting (builder), curating materials and actors (broker) and experimenting with imagined futures (beacon).

Universities' work as experimental beacons is evident in their attempts to remake urban space. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, many universities have aimed to counter established patterns of urban growth by promoting peripheralized parts of cities. Thus, for example, in the 1990s and 2000s UPenn invested $500 million in real estate development along the edge of its campus, with a focus on possibilities for community benefit (Harkavy and Hodges, 2017; see Wolf-Powers, 2022; Baldwin, 2021 for a critique). Western Sydney University encouraged economic development in and around Parramatta, New South Wales, through building three new campuses (Ruming, 2023: 234). Moreover, Monash University worked to develop parts of suburban and peri-urban Melbourne, Australia, through a focus on urban growth (Tomaney and Wray, 2011). Combining economic and sustainability initiatives – and building on the idea of prefiguration – in the 2000s Syracuse University in the US developed outreach programs in the Near Westside neighbourhood of the city (Cantor et al., 2013). These included assistance to community members with home energy audits to help residents devise energy efficiency strategies, financial training and consultation for deconstruction projects aimed at improving sustainability.

Such beacon activity is also evident in emerging work outside Euro-America. For example, the Intercultural University of Veracruz in Mexico has used the Sustainable Development Goal framework to contribute to environmental protection, health, livelihoods and gender equality (Perales Franco and McCowan, 2021). As part of its purpose, the University emphasises a need to showcase its work and catalyse change in its wider environment. Medina-Bueno et al. (2024) argue that small universities in Peru have frequently been working concertedly to engage their local communities while simultaneously acting as exemplars. They cite the example of the University of Arequipa which has built impactful relationships with local small business in part through the development of a technology and science park.

In all these examples, universities tested and developed ways of offering social assistance to neighbourhoods (see also Addie, 2020). In doing so, they often – but not inevitably (see Wolf-Powers, 2022) – contributed to wider efforts to reposition peripheralized neighbourhoods as centres of urban vitality. Universities’ efforts to enervate marginalised urban areas also resonate with the second sense of being a ‘beacon’: they involved seeking to draw people, business, activity and ideas into their orbit. This highlights links between building, brokering and serving as a beacon: Universities have the intention of building urban change, brokering serves as a basis for reflecting upon and extending this role and this activity may reinforce the reputation of the university as exemplar (Baldwin, 2021).

Universities’ attempts to act as beacons are often especially evident where universities concentrate on both the place-contingent nature of economic, social, political and cultural practice as well as the value of obtaining perspectives across multiple places. This argument parallels the observation in economic geography that international commercial success rests upon place-based and trans-local knowledge and collaboration (Coe et al., 2017; Wood et al., 2016). For universities, trans-locality can occur within a single city region. For example, the Newcastle City Futures initiative and Wider City Futures Development Group encouraged prefigurative change in the areas of housing and transport in the Newcastle metropolitan region – the development of a ‘test-bed city’ (Vallance et al., 2020) – in part by recognising the importance of drawing in people from multiple neighbourhoods. The initiative’s efforts to improve public transport and housing relied not only on engaging people from different sectors but those with different experiences based on their place of origin (see Vallance et al., 2020). Misra and Pugh (2023) develop this theme through tracking the capacity of new Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) in provincial India to build local and regional engagement. They argue that these universities have constructed productive relationships with local businesses and government while also organising outreach within communities, including science camps, teacher training programs and other forms of school engagement. The ability of these institutions to engage successfully in these ways was derived both from their engagement with local place and horizontal relationships of learning and collaboration across the nation-wide IIT group, a particular form of ‘networked embeddedness’ (Hess, 2004) or ‘strategic coupling’ (Coe et al., 2017). These observations parallel work on other organisations that have focused on trans-local engagement as a basis for success, such as schools with multiple international campuses (Waters, 2012) and retail organisations (Wood et al., 2016).

VII Base

Some university leaders historically imagined their institutions as spaces apart from society – ‘detached sites of critical enquiry’ (Goddard and Pukka, 2008), ‘fortresses’ (Nyanchwani, 2019) or wedded to the ‘uncontaminated space of the laboratory’ (Bulkeley et al., 2019: 16). However, governments have frequently challenged the spatial idea of universities as ‘ivory towers’ during the twenty-first century. Reflecting this point, and also universities’ common location in neighbourhoods that are experiencing socio-economic struggle, many universities have rethought the physical infrastructure of the university as a space: The university as a base (see Brooks and Waters, 2017). The reciprocal relationships that universities are commonly seeking to build with communities require the university in its physical form to be a welcoming environment, open to public engagement, appropriately flexible and conducive to people remaining on campus or other forms of university property. During the 2000s and 2010s, university leaders have worked with others to integrate campuses into public environments in Bolivia (Ivancheva, 2023), the US (Cantor et al., 2013) and South Africa (Combrinck and Nortjé, 2021). In these examples, the university becomes a public base for social exchange, reflection and discovery-related practice. This emphasis on the university as ‘agora’ (Schafran, 2015) may be associated with contradictions, however. For example, many South African universities have identified trade-offs between making their campuses porous and ensuring that they are secure (see Bank et al., 2018; Combrinck and Nortjé, 2021). Moreover, Baldwin (2021) and Wolf-Powers (2022) have argued that campus security forces not only create safety for some but also render life more insecure for others.

In developing their physical infrastructure as a base or bases, universities commonly seek to establish their campuses or other forms of university property as locally grounded and networked into trans-local, including international opportunities. For example, Monash University has established a set of campuses and entities across the world that serve as hubs for local engagement and launchpads for trans-local community engagement projects (Tomaney and Wray, 2011). At a smaller spatial scale, Addie (2017) cites the example of Syracuse University, which has established ‘little free libraries’ across the city that offer a counterpoint to the centrality of the university itself. These libraries stock books on topics that local community members have identified as important and thus become the repositories of information about similarities and differences between the interests of different neighbourhoods across a city. Ivancheva (2023) describes how alternative universities in Bolivia sought to develop nodes of influence through launching ‘caravans of happiness’. These caravans contained singers, artists and campaigners who spread political messages across localities, for example, regarding the desirability of massifying higher education, while also incorporating ideas that emerge through the spaces they connect. Such mobile anchoring has also been developed recently at Monash University through the development of a justice bus that adjusts its focus according to the specific legal needs of the local communities through which it passes. Paralleling work with migrant communities, this also allows Monash to learn about different localities (see Regasa and Lietaert, 2024).

Universities also develop hubs that bring together people around their idea of trans-local engagement. For example, the University of Toronto Scarborough developed a Master Plan in 2017 that was organised around the idea of the university as an intellectual, cultural and employment node for multiple city communities. Rutgers University focused much of their anchor institution effort on bringing together private and public institutional leaders from multiple places into one site (Harris and Holley, 2016). Leaders here created a uni-community arts collaboratory in an abandoned building close to one of their campuses: a deliberately prefigurative ‘third space' for education, community dialogue, and activism (see Hodges, 2024). As in the case of universities creating branch campuses or mobile facilities, the Rutgers collaboratory was a base simultaneously for people from several sectors and place-based communities. The widespread development of university precincts is also indicative of the creation of bases that create opportunities for trans-local exchange, often including drawing together ‘locals’ from across national boundaries. The University of Witwatersrand’s Tshimologong Digital Innovation Precinct is typical in its focus on using digital innovation to foster interaction between local areas (Abrahams, 2020). In a similar vein, three universities in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil, have recently developed an innovation ecosystem that draws together the skills and knowledge of several local communities and puts them in conversation with each other (McCowan, 2016). This included the development of an Institute for Innovation, university/community co-working spaces, funding for company expansion and education and environmental initiatives. As in the cases of Toronto, Rutgers and Witwatersrand, these Brazilian universities simultaneously serve as bases for enhancing local embeddedness and fostering an understanding of the importance of trans-local, often international, engagement, again paralleling work on firms in economic geography (cf Coe et al., 2017).

This effort to establish the university as a base is sometimes related to the idea of the university as a space of succour during times of difficulty. For example, during the current cost of living crisis in Europe, universities have often served as a node in the provision of food relief (see Davies et al., 2019). In addition, in periods of public emergency, a university may be a refuge, as, for example, occurred in the case of universities during public unrest (Roberts, 2015). Mobley Jr (2017) locates such examples with reference to a broader history of universities as sites of ‘sanctuary’ for sections of society. These instances of the university as a site of succour or refuge resonate particularly closely with the connotations of the word anchor: shelter, tie and mooring point. There is a relationship between sheltering and serving as a beacon – universities serve as a protected space for a range of experimental practices (see Evans and Karnoven, 2014). There are also close links between acting as a sanctuary and serving as a broker. Universities are often required to serve as safe spaces for staff and students to curate knowledge (Pielke, 2007; see also Ignatieff, 2024). Where universities act as sanctuaries they may be required to build trans-locality. For example, Preston (2024) has described the role of John Hopkins University (JHU) in managing the COVID crisis. JHU developed a Coronavirus Resource Centre and COVID-19 database. It also partnered with the Baltimore City Health Department to set up mobile COVID-19 testing teams and, when vaccines became available, established clinics in churches, schools, shopping centres and other sites – spaces of succour and support that were spread across and connected multiple local sites.

VIII Conclusions

There are reasons for geographers to remain cautious about universities’ capacity for progressive change, not least the recent publication of several studies that demonstrate the weaknesses of some universities’ local engagement (e.g. Baldwin, 2021; Wolf-Powers, 2022) as well as tensions within universities over how to balance global and local responsibilities (e.g. Addie and Paskins, 2016; Benneworth, 2014). Universities may harm localities, and their benefits are often associated with costs and contradictions (e.g. Addie, 2020; Bank et al., 2018; Etienne, 2012). Nevertheless, the progressive potential of universities is evident across numerous studies. There is accumulating evidence that universities benefit local societies and do so in multiple, intersecting and spatialised ways.

Universities playing anchoring roles do so in ways that are similar across the world but articulated differently and often with different results. A common denominator, however, is their tendency to build, broker, serve as beacons and operate as bases. As builders, they revitalise societies and are sometimes key to urban survival (e.g. Dragevic, 2015; Ivancheva, 2023), albeit in ways that are compromised and partial (Walker and East, 2018). As brokers, they act as convenors, curators and facilitators. They develop and manage relationships between people and institutions that are differently positioned with respect to standing, background, ideological position and agendas (see Bundy, 1987; Schafran, 2015). Universities are also beacons, modelling ways of imagining educational institutions, including through their built form, engagement practices, technological work and orientation to addressing inequalities. Finally, universities are bases. The physical form of universities is often closely related to its priorities and actions (Benneworth, 2014; Brook and Waters, 2017; Whyte, 2015). University campuses or other spaces are often crucial for communicating and permitting their roles as builder, broker and beacon. In many contexts universities are becoming more open and intelligible to local communities (Bank et al., 2018), even while there are often deep contradictions associated with this process (see Baldwin, 2021).

The broader relevance of this work for an understanding of geographies of universities and geographies of education is threefold. First, the analysis points to the importance in many places of universities’ concern with their immediate urban neighbourhoods which, while not new, has found fresh expression in the anchoring idea. Notwithstanding the point that technologies are shrinking space and making location less important as a determinant of collaboration, the local remains an imaginative and important basis for universities’ engagement with communities. In widely varied sites, and for different reasons in different places, there has been an upsurge of universities seeking to engage productively with their local neighbourhoods, and there are ‘family resemblances’ between how they do so in strikingly different sites, for example, in the US and China. Governments have encouraged this ‘local turn’ in many places, but it has also been generated more organically through demands placed on universities by populations in their vicinity, and is especially apparent where universities themselves have emerged as a result of community struggle, for example, in Southern Brazil (McCowan, 2016, 2018).

Second, the analysis highlights the progressive potential of universities in localities and the contradictions of such progressivism. Universities as anchor institutions are sometimes lessening inequalities and empowering local populations (see also Birch et al., 2013). Universities’ work as builders – in particular – is sometimes key to urban growth or regeneration. Moreover, increasing social inequalities and rising authoritarianism within formally democratic countries make the role of universities as potential sites of progressive action more important in the 2020s than it was thirty years ago. There is need for further research on universities’ empowering potential, the social and spatial practices through which progressive action unfolds and the possibilities for universities to be builder, broker, beacon and base. At the same time, consideration of universities as anchors underlines the contradictions of education (cf Holloway and Jons, 2012). Universities are often reproducing or deepening inequalities. Moreover, there are many situations in which the progressive capacity of universities is under threat, for example, due to pressures associated with internationalisation and commercialisation (e.g. Addie, 2020; Walker and East, 2018). Analysis of anchoring highlights a point made in geographies of education more widely that the contradictions of educational institutions are evident in their spatial practices, for example, the manner in which they make campuses more accessible to broad communities or, alternatively, create securitised spaces of exclusion. Additionally, consideration of anchoring shows that these socio-spatial contradictions – and the relative importance of emphasising progressivism vis-à-vis the reproduction of inequalities – vary geographically. The likely further rise of studies of the contradictory role of universities as anchors in places such as South Africa (see Bank et al., 2018), China (Ruoppila and Zhao, 2017), India (Misra and Pugh, 2023) and Brazil (McCowan, 2018) will permit the elaboration of this point.

A third contribution of this paper to wider geographies of universities and geographies of education is to highlight the importance of reflecting further on emergent trans-local geographies of education (Kratfl et al., 2022; Waters, 2012). Reflecting work in geography on place (e.g. Massey, 2013), ‘the local’ surrounding universities is typically also a portal into national and international flows of ideas, people and materials, for example, where universities engage with migrant populations (Addie, 2020). Building on this observation and in other ways universities are connecting their immediate catchment areas to wider flows. This happens across a variety of university activities, through recruiting students from varying places (see Collins, 2014), via spatially expansive research (Misra and Pugh, 2023), and through university operations (Birch et al., 2013), for example. But it also occurs through universities’ engagement work, including how it anchors. Universities are increasingly recognising the benefits of understanding and working with multiple locals, either: sub-nationally, for example, working in a range of distinct urban neighbourhoods as part of an anchor cluster; nationally, as, for example, where an institution forms part of a national network of universities engaged in anchoring (Addie, 2020); or internationally, such as in the case of a university having multiple branch campuses across the world (Tomaney and Wray, 2011).

These points bear on geographical work on the embeddedness of organisations and individuals more broadly. Paralleling arguments made in work on embeddedness and firms, consideration of anchoring shows that the economic, social, political and cultural character of localities shape organisations such as universities just as organisations in turn shape place (see Amin and Cohavet, 2005; Coe et al., 2017; Jones, 2008). This paper advances an understanding of these relationships by highlighting the value placed by contemporary universities on connecting to local communities. Yet consistent with several critiques of the embeddedness literature (cf Hess, 2004; Jones, 2008), universities are seeking to balance hyper-local engagement with trans-localism, often across international boundaries – a type of ‘strategic coupling’ (Coe et al., 2017). Also paralleling work on global firms (Coe et al., 2017) and retail organisations (Wood et al., 2016), as more universities in different areas become involved in anchoring, the commitment to the local itself becomes a basis for cross-national conversation and joint working. Moreover, and again resonating with work in economic geography, the extent to which it is analytically important to stress universities’ embeddedness, vis-a-vis their trans-local and international connections, varies through time and geographically. This is a point I have developed through reference to a growing tendency for universities to engage with multiple locals in the twenty-first century, especially but not exclusively in the US. Future research might reflect further on this issue as more studies occur outside Euro-America.

The builder, broker, beacon and base framework also provides a basis for developing the points made by scholars such as Vlasov et al. (2018) in the context of entrepreneurs and Porst and Sakdapolak (2017) in relation to migrants that it is important to examine different forms of place-based embeddedness. For example, universities may be embedded in relation to some populations locally but not others (Wolf-Powers, 2022). They may develop forms of political embeddedness that facilitate action while not being as embedded socially and culturally (see Bank et al., 2018). I have also drawn attention through the idea of anchoring and the ideas of builder, broker, beacon and base, to different ways in which embeddedness in place can be conceptualised. Embeddedness may be generative (builder), facilitative (broker), exemplary (beacon) and physical (base). It would be valuable for geographers to reflect further on the similarities and differences between universities’ embeddedness and that of other institutions – such as retail organisations (Wood et al., 2016), city governments (Thomas, 2005) and firms (Coe et al., 2017). The builder, broker, beacon and base framework provides a basis for such comparative work.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank editor, Noel Castree, and two reviewers for their generous comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I also thank Jean-Paul Addie, Harriet Bulkeley, Allie Clemans, Edwina Cornish, Tristan McCowan, Zarina Patel, Diego Ramirez, Jamil Tye, Mohan Avvari Visweswara and Johanna Waters for commenting on earlier drafts of this paper. None bear responsibility for any errors that remain.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Craig Jeffrey

Author biography

Professor Craig Jeffrey is Deputy Vice Chancellor and Senior Vice President at Monash University.

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