The city as campus: regional organization of research universities

Abstract We argue that research universities are best understood as regional systems of learning rather than stand-alone organizations. We introduce the concept of the university complex, a regional agglomeration of multiple universities whose complementarities and competition jointly shape knowledge production, talent attraction, and local spillovers. Using comparable indicators across U.S. Metropolitan Areas and selected global regions, we show that multi-university complexes outperform single-university regions on measures of scientific output and exhibit more diverse specialization profiles. We also show that universities in complexes do not empirically trade-off between economies of scale and economies of scope. These results contribute to the regional innovation systems literature by showing that ‘ivory towers’ are deeply regionalized.