Boston’s New City Center Triangles
The Future of New England Is A conglomeration of Self-Contained Mini-Tech Cities
The Boston area, including Cambridge, escaped the Great Financial Recessional of 2007–2010 unscathed. As a grumpy boomer, I feel it should pay for its chutzpah in the next downturn. I may have to pound sand. The Boston area is once again reinventing itself.
This story told in triangles. I’ve made up some names for them.
The attributes of these triangles are as follows:
- Strong anchor organization: Harvard, Amazon, Sanofi
- Modern high-tech productivity space
- New condos/apartments within walking distance
- Close to a park / water
- Close to family housing (usually modernized older houses)
Boston’s most important resource is the intellectual capital grown at Harvard, MIT, Boston University, Boston College, Tufts, Brandeis and a bunch of other small colleges. Dartmouth, Yale, Cornell and Columbia are all less then four hours away.
For decades, the land across the river from Harvard, Allston, was a mostly barren landscape punctuated by Harvard Stadium the Harvard business school.
Then came the Harvard Innovation Lab in late 2011. The area continues to grow into a self-sufficient mini-city.
Triangle #1: The (Harvard) Innovation Triangle (Allston)
What about Amazon? They’re building in the Boston Seaport.
Triangle #2: The Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) Triangle (Seaport)
And the most focused triangle for last.
Triangle #3: The Biotech Triangle (Cambridge Crossing)
Again, you can study this satellite images for today’s trends in city development. Here’s my latest drone update from 6/26/21 on YouTube
When the elite graduate, or those with daring-do and something to prove from community-college-nowheresville, they can move to the triangle of their choice. Have a startup idea? Move to the innovation triangle.
Did you get a job at Amazon? Get placed in the logistics triangle.
Is your dream to cure cancer? Then the biotech triangle will take care of your every need.
Further development between Boston University and Northeastern is also going strong.
Here’s a map showing more triangles. What the heck!
Creative, hardworking and ambitious future elites don’t want 12 months of nice, but unchallenging weather. They want seasons. They thrive in winter hardships and summer heat.
From its inception, New England has always been a struggle for those who live here. Struggle is good.
Many of these historical images were obtained using the amazing mapjunction.com site.
I’m new to this stuff. Some interesting comments at archBoston.org
(If you want the doom and gloom view, I wrote one here).
