Innovation And Space

Of course every city wants to be innovative. Who wants to be the opposite, left on the side of the road? The more interesting debate is what sort of spaces facilitate innovation. There are "smart cities," whose infrastructure, aka "operating system" among aficionados, runs on constant feedback loops to maximize efficiency. But those are being built at the scale of planned cities, recalling modernist planning. There is New York's RFP for a new university to move to town, specifically with a technology-focused campus to jumpstart an industry that's never flourished there. But the Bloomberg administration's preferred location is Roosevelt Island, removed from the city's fabric.

Then there's the Innovation District in Boston, which the Menino administration coined about 18 months ago to revive the overly planned but never really executed redevelopment of the Seaport District. The greatest, most publicized triumph thus far was the decision by Vertex, a prominent pharmaceutical company, to move its headquarters into a new luxury office building on the waterfront. However, Boston poached Vertex from Cambridge using a host of tax breaks, which is boringly reminiscent of circa 1986 urban policy. As a friend said, the most innovative part is that Vertex's lease was dependent on the FDA's approval of a new drug. (It's been approved.) Instead, the Innovation District has a popular cluster of ho-hum restaurants.

Then there are two buildings Paul Goldberger recently reviewed in the New Yorker: the University of California San Francisco's new stem cell research center and the Rockefeller University's new science center (in New York). "At Rockefeller you can't reach any of the labs without going through the common space first. In San Francisco, lounges are set in between laboratories to encourage mixing," Goldberger writes. These architects and scientists are on to something, and not only because I tried to create a studio project one semester around a similar idea. Innovation happens when new groups of people, with overlapping but not uniformly like interests, interact regularly with each other. Enticing a science company's headquarters downtown sure helps the municipal property tax base, which is important, but doesn't create the ecosystem needed to generate the new thing.

Innovation doesn't equal smart engineers + venture capitalists + lawyers. Rather, there are complex series of interactions between tinkerers, entrepreneurs, professional supporters, academics, and seemingly boring but actually integral suppliers, middlemen and manufacturers, where ingenuity happens in the mutations that come from the products and interactions they share with each other. This is another sort of feedback loop, intellectually rigorous but messier in its evolution than a "smart city" would prefer, where experiments happen as new ideas take hold. Space takes on a very important role in this model. These groups of people interact, but not as often as they should, so buildings, as these two do, need to offer informal and formal points of collaboration that value the sparks that come from proximity; and on a broader scale, real estate has to be developed, and urban land managed, in a way that values the role of the the less glitzy and the workaday. The technologically and economically sexy can't exist without that. Innovation doesn't only come from Class A headquarters. Or, as Greg Lindsay put it in his recent criticism of "smart cities" in the Times, "the smartest cities are the ones that embrace openness, randomness and serendipity."