Exploring the meaning of campus through lived experiences of students, staff, and visitors

University campuses are important places of cultural, intellectual, and economic capital, making significant contributions to their surrounding communities. As institutions seek to navigate changing expectations for university teaching, learning, research and impact, an exploration of the interface of individual experience and the campus environment is both timely and valuable. This is especially true amidst the post-pandemic push to reenergize the physical campus. Our study integrates findings from a case study across two institutions, one in the UK and one in Australia, to explore the question: How is ‘campus’ conceptualized through the lived experiences of students, staff, and visitors? With a focus on the human experience of the physical campus, this study adopts its theoretical lens from the field of occupational therapy. We argue that a campus should provide its inhabitants spaces to do, be, become, and belong. The suite of research methods applied to this question, and documented here, offer an avenue for the extension of this work to a diverse range of institutions and to digital environments. Findings from the study include four themes relevant to the conceptualization of campus: campus experience and personal identity; campus identity and transformation; campus mobility and boundaries; and campus spatial functionality and usage.