Relearning and retaining (or not) old lessons: Urban economics, agglomeration economies, and adaptive reuse of "a large stock of old buildings"

charlie responded to the recent entry, "Learning what not to do from the New England Patriots football team," saying I wasn't saying anything really new.  True.  But it seems that people have a hard time learning or retaining previous knowledge, so sadly these kinds of points need to be constantly repeated.

Separately, in response to the previous entry, "Federal government research hub development initiative," charlie included links to two important articles, "The ‘bump factor’ returns to Kendall Square: Random meetings in the compact hub help to fuel the local biotech cluster," from the Boston Globe and "The duo turning old Milan into a snapshot of contemporary design," from the Financial Times, which reiterate some of the arguments of the entry.

At the same time, statements in both articles illustrate the point of the leadership entry, that foundational understandings in urban economics, specifically the concept of agglomeration economies, and the value of old buildings in supporting the development of new businesses, seem to get lost, or that people would rather come up with new terms, without acknowledging the original learning.

Graphic: The benefits of agglomeration: Centre for Cities, "The impact of agglomeration on the economy." 

Like "bump factor" instead of the term "agglomeration economies."

Agglomeration economies and the biotech cluster in Cambridge Massachusetts.The Globe article explains why I am such a proponent of face to face, cluster development and agglomeration economies. From the article:

The vaunted “bump factor” is thriving again in this biosciences hub after a pandemic that limited human contact and forced many to retreat to their home offices. The factor has adjusted to the new hybrid work world — bumping mostly happens Tuesday through Thursday. But the ease with which drug developers and financiers can run into each other remains a competitive advantage for the neighborhood dubbed “the most innovative square mile on planet Earth.”' 

”It’s our secret sauce,” said Kendalle Burlin O’Connell, chief executive of the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council. The potential to generate new ideas and partnerships through chance encounters is unmatched by less compact and more car-reliant rival clusters like California’s Bay Area or North Carolina’s Research Triangle, say Kendall Square boosters. Even in Boston’s Seaport district, fast emerging as a satellite biotech hub, the buildings are too isolated and the blocks too large to support a healthy bump factor. 

... After three years of relative isolation, many are hungry for connection. Some gatherings are larger now than in pre-pandemic times. Attendance at Thursday night programs and networking events at Venture Care have drawn an average of 419 people this fall, up from353 in 2019.

... But close encounters during the rest of the week were a selling point in the successful campaign to lure the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, a new federal research agency known as ARPA-H, to Cambridge, said O’Connell, the MassBio CEO.

You can make work work well with Zoom if you are committed to collaboration with the right people and the right tools.  But you lose out on the ability to generate external serendipitous connections. 

I remember when the multimedia Internet was first launched so to speak, and I was on a marketing e-list where the new field of e-commerce and Internet based marketing was the primary topic. 

The founder of the list was big on the creation of "Internet Malls" modeled on real malls. I argued with him that unlike IRL, there was no reason for people on the Internet mall to shop "adjacencies."  In a mall you walk past other stores so your top of mind awareness is pricked.  But on the Internet, you go straight to your destination without being pricked with other sites (unless you use Google search or once you do a search within Amazon, etc.).

But in work, those adjacencies may be essential in sparking new ideas, relationships, funding deals, etc. 

Think of Katalin Kariko at the copy machine where she met Drew Fleischman.  If she hadn't met Fleischman and gotten some financial support through his connections at Penn, maybe she would have left, and not developed further the mRNA technologies that went into the covid vaccine.

The lesson is that in these districts especially the smaller ones, you need to work to build the systems, events, restaurants, etc., that help spark serendipitous encounters. Although the Boston (Cambridge) people really should understand urban economics better. I guess Ed Glaeser isn't doing his job.

Old buildings/new buildings and arts and design as consumption versus production: Milan.  I have been writing about this topic for many years.  

The FT article discusses a group in Milan, Alcova, sparked by Milan's annual Design Week, that does "installations" in abandoned buildings and structures, making a seemingly interesting point about reuse of old buildings for the arts versus new arts centers.  About how Alcova is unique.  They aren't.  But I guess a key lesson of the last few decades of urban revitalization has been lost.

In reality, what they think of as new is very old, something Jane Jacobs wrote about in Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961!, about the value of cities maintaining a large stock of old buildings to support innovation, because (before the modernized finance system which refinances everything so costs go up) old buildings are paid off and have low rents, and startups need low rents.

Note that over the past 30 years, in Dublin (a vacated bus terminal in Temple Bar), Helsinki (Cabelfactory), and Marseille (La Friche), among others, arts based revitalization has been stoked by the redevelopment of what had been white elephant buildings.

Midtown Exchange, Minneapolis.

Historic preservation as an urban revitalization strategy is all about adaptive reuse of old buildings to support new uses.  There are thousands of examples across the country.  

One is the reuse of the Sprague Electric campus in North Adams Massachusetts for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts.  

Another is the adaptation of old Sears combination catalog distribution centers and department stores in cities like Minneapolis and Memphis as multiuse mixed use facilities.  

In Los Angeles they are trying to figure this out with the old Sears in Boyle Heights.  Baltimore did this with a Montgomery Ward catalog distribution center and store.  Etc.

Until more recently, with the boom of new construction (now slackened in the post-covid business environment), historic preservation was the most successful urban revitalization strategy around.  Good books on this are Cities Back from the Edge, The Living Downtown, and Changing Places.  

I think the real difference is between money and not money, bootstraps versus top down, and arts as production versus arts as consumption (presenting arts performances to static audiences). 

For example, recently opened large arts centers, The Shed in the Hudson Yards and the Perelman at Ground Zero in NYC, and the originally named Factory based on Manchester music history, now called Aviva Studios after a donor are all new from the ground up.  They cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build. And they are focused on arts as presentation and consumption.

Those can be hard to fund continually, although NYC is a different situation entirely. I know the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia has ongoing funding issues.  Reviving the Cabelfactory or La Friche cost almost nothing by comparison.

Arts production versus consumption is what John Montgomery discusses in his original paper on the subject, now 20 years old. Cultural Quarters as Mechanisms for Urban Regeneration. Part 1: Conceptualising Cultural Quarters is discussed in my original "Arts, culture districts and revitalization" entry in 2009, but the entry has been updated a bunch of times.  

It's the difference too between a building and a multi building arts district/cultural quarter/innovation district.  Also, the new from the ground up arts centers are about consumption, not production. 

Characteristics of cultural quarters
From Montgomery (2003).  Slightly revised and reordered 

1. Cultural venues at a variety of scales, including small and medium. 
2. Availability of workspaces for artists and low-cost cultural producers. 
3. Small-firm economic development in the cultural sectors. 
4. Managed workspaces for office and studio users. 
5. Location of arts development agencies and companies. 
6. Arts and media training and education. 
7. Art in the environment (public art, arts incorporated into buildings, etc.)
8. Community arts development initiatives. 
9. Stable arts funding. 
10. Identity, image development, branding and marketing support. 
11. Complementary day-time uses. 
12. Complementary evening uses.

From the FT article: 

Where many cities think cultural infrastructure means financing new architecture, Grima and Ciuffi propose a new paradigm: working, through temporary interventions, with what already exists, offering a blueprint that administrations can follow. “If we really want to talk about sustainability in the design field and respect for the environment, the first step an architect must take, paradoxically, is not to build,” says Grima, adding that his profession has historically “been very animated by the impetus to do new things”. 

... Alcova was founded at a pivotal moment in the history of Milan, after the 2015 Expo, when big brands began to come to the Design Week in larger numbers. “This made it more difficult for young people to find space,” Grima recalls. “It seemed a shame to us, because everyone comes to Milan to see the future of design. We said to ourselves, ‘There is an opportunity here of doing something new.’”

The article also discusses how with the rise in success of Milan's Design Week, small firms are being crowded out by large firms and their ability to add underutilized buildings and structures to the mix maintains the ability of small firms to participate because of the way they offer participation to small firms only.

That only reiterates the point made by Jacobs.