My concern in this article is how the university might become more distributed, less concentrated in particular places and times, and more permeable to different sorts of interests. In order to do this, I have written a partly autobiographical reflection on an attempt to practice the work of the university differently. It is the early story of a sort of 'research institute' which is attempting to take the problems of its city region seriously and find ways to connect the resources of a large elite university to many other organisations in its locality. In theoretical terms, the article uses the idea of 'social infrastructure' as a way of thinking about how an institution operates beyond its imagined temporal and spatial boundaries and co-produces with people who have different identities and capacities.