Quote:
Originally Posted by GeoffD
Tech centers are usually anchored by multiple elite universities. Stanford/UCB. Harvard/MIT. NYC tri-state with big pharma. One Ivy doesn't get you to critical mass. You're never going to see Hanover, NH or Ithaca, NY as a tech center any more than you'd see New Haven. Philly has the same problem. Research Triangle Park never quite got there despite Duke, the low tax/cheap real estate climate, and all the state money. Providence is at least close enough to the metro-Boston tech center to have a shot at it.
DC has the infinite government money so it's a special case. Seattle had the dumb luck of Bill Gates. Chicago should do better.
I suppose this won't be popular in a Rhode Island forum but I view Providence as being an edge city for Boston just like Worcester though a way better city than Worcester. If the NIMBY people hadn't killed the I-95 Southwest Corridor project years ago, we'd have a 10 lane superhighway connecting them and Providence would be booming. With only the Southeast Expressway, Providence might as well be on the moon if you're sitting in Kendall Square. Yeah, there's the Red Line and Amtrak but you also need to be able to drive it and it's not like it's easy to get to and from the Providence Amtrak station.
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I don’t agree with most of this. It’s far more complicated than your synopsis renders. I’ll make a first order response.
First, I think your notion of Tech Centers is far too restrictive. There are far more than you admit. Wikipedia has a much longer list, for instance. And of course looking at that list, the criteria of two elite universities isn’t met by even half of them. Incidentally, I see no reason to exclude Research Triangle in NC from the list of tech centers.
But if you want to say
top two “Tech Centers” nationwide (I’m going to leave ‘tri-state’ NYC alone), it’s arguably ok to limit it to Bay Area, CA and greater Boston. But the differential distance between UCB and Stanford vs. Harvard/MIT and Brown is only 15 miles; it’s not enough to exclude PVD as part of the mix on that basis. And I would argue that the Bay Area and its spread-out elite universities is a stronger Tech Center than Cambridge itself, even with the two elite universities you mention in very close proximity plus throwing in nearby Tufts, BU, and Brandeis all side by each. No, the center of mass of greater Boston tech has, for perhaps the last half a century, been to the north and west of Boston, in spite of what’s going on at Brown. Universities are a part of the equation but not the dominating term in it. As to the Tech Center of “greater Boston”, it’s not in Cambridge as you might expect (if you put all the weight on the University term of the equation), but along the 128 belt. Clearly there are other factors at play that can’t be dropped from the equation.
There’s history to this, and a great deal of it has to do with military funding during World War II. Indeed technology is more often than not driven by military concerns, a fact which predates our country’s founding by centuries, let alone WWII. Both Hanscom AFB and MIT’s Radiation Laboratory (which evolved into the Research Laboratory of Electronics) got their starts during WWII. The 128 Tech Belt is a result of Hanscom (and later, the adjacent MIT Lincoln Lab).
RI has the Navy in Newport, but those funding dollars have seemingly dried up 40+ years ago and our congressional delegation impotent to reverse that. We’ve got Brown and maybe something happening at URI. What else?
I don’t know that Seattle was just dumb luck, either. There was a culture of tech savvy individuals in aerospace with Boeing, for instance (again, driven by military funding). There’s a bright, engaged populace there. Yes, the engagement of the population with science and engineering and a love of knowledge in general is a factor in the equation too. Are Rhode Islanders tech savvy? Intellectually curious? While Rhode Islanders probably aren’t generally as tech savvy as those in Eastern Mass., they’re not dopes.
Alfie’s right about this: you have to start somewhere. Tech centers rise and fall. There’s little reason to prognosticate that a small place like Ithaca or Hanover won’t be a tech center someday. There’s little reason to think the present Tech Centers will stand forever, and likewise that places which aren’t now tech centers won’t be in the future… Think, for instance, of Detroit and the automobile industry.
Back here in Providence, we shouldn’t be swinging for the fences; we should grow our strengths, look for ways we can partner with our neighbors to our north, and put policies in place that encourage responsible, sustainable, slow growth.
[Other posters have aptly identified the fallacy of the “10 lane” highway that wasn’t built being some sort of magic potion. For instance, induced demand was pretty widely discussed in the context of fast-growing Portland, Oregon’s growth at least 20 years ago. Yes we need to establish synergies with our neighbors to the north but it is not as if Boston is Mars, or even the moon (to reverse the positions). Another highway wouldn’t have made anything better and probably would have made things worse.
And what, exactly, is difficult about getting to Providence Amtrak Station? I go there often, and it is easy to do so.]
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