Research Parks for the Knowledge Economy

Nations are constructing lavish science parks, often with big city amenities, to gain a competitive edge in the global economy

By Pete Engardio

• View Slide Show

Since it opened 50 years ago, North Carolina's Research Triangle Park has been the epitome of science parks: a neatly landscaped campus of low-rise building buildings in exurbia, where scientists at aspiring technology spin-offs from nearby universities toil all day in cramped, low-rent "incubators" and then disperse each evening to fight the Interstate traffic on their way home.

The rest of the world is moving far beyond that model. As more nations try to gain an edge in the next generation of knowledge industries, stunning new high-tech meccas are going up from Asia to Europe to Latin America, a building spree that hardly has been slowed by the recession. They are nothing like the far-flung developments of old like Research Triangle Park, which was carved out of 11 square miles of pine forest near Raleigh-Durham. Many, in fact, are being constructed deep inside old cities and include nearby housing and city amenities with the intention of creating new communities.

"New Century Cities"

Spain's 22@Barcelona project, for example, involves transforming 115 blocks of industrial land in Barcelona's historic cotton district into an international hub for more than 1,000 media, information technology, and medical technology companies; research institutes; and university labs that could employ 150,000 in 15 years. Seoul's new 135-acre Digital Media City aspires to be a global ecosystem for developing and deploying cutting-edge technologies for entertainment, games, and interactive workplaces. And Singapore is pouring some $10 billion into futuristic architecture for a megadevelopment called One North, which integrates new research complexes and "living laboratories" for biotechnology, advanced materials, and medical services.

Many of these "new century cities," as urban planning guru Michael Joroff of Massachusetts Institute of Technology dubs them, will be showcased at the annual International Association of Science Parks conference on June 1-4 in Raleigh, N.C.

"The vision is to kick-start high-priority industries with new spaces where companies and universities can work together and develop the next generation of workers," says Joroff, an adviser to the media city in Seoul and similar projects in Britain, Sweden, and Abu Dhabi. "They are about inventing the future, so they want to be of the future."

New science parks can be tightly focused. Snowpolis, in Vuokatti, Finland, is a collaboration between Finnish companies, universities, and education institutes that specializes in wellness, sports, and cold-weather technologies. And Winston-Salem, N.C., which is reeling from the collapse of the textile, furniture, and tobacco industries, is refurbishing much of its urban core into a biotech hub called the Piedmont Triad Research Park. Its prize tenant: one of the nation's leading centers for regenerative medicine, led by Dr. Anthony Atala, a pioneer in growing organs from patients' own tissue.

Building Communities

Whatever the focus, the trend is to nurture living, breathing communities rather than sterile, remote compounds of research silos. Planners don't want to mimic Triangle Research Park's original design or Tsukuba Science City, where 13,000 researchers toil in 300 R&D facilities in an isolated site an hour away by train from Tokyo. Instead, they are drawing inspiration from the kind of vibrant ecosytem that evolved organically near the MIT campus in Cambridge, Mass. They hope to design their parks based on visions of what 21st century innovation environments will need.

Most new research parks incorporate the trappings of "new urbanism," the planning principles at work at the preferred destinations for young creative types. That means relatively inexpensive housing within minutes of labs by foot or bike.

Business Exchange

Track and share business topics across the Web.