We Think a Lot
We Think a Lot
From Square to Hip in North Carolina’s Research Triangle
The Research Triangle has been called North Carolina’s “axis of cool” and “hipster vibe factory” full of food trucks and indie bands. For decades, North Carolinians have boasted that the three-city “triangle” of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill includes the greatest concentration of PhDs of any region in the country. This essay shows planners and boosters successfully leveraged local universities and cultural resources to attract firms such as IBM and Glaxo since the late 1950s, arguing that smart people—scientists and engineers—wanted to live around other smart people. In doing so, they not only established one of the South’s most dynamic tech hubs, but also prefigured the “creative class” strategy of development over forty years before urbanist Richard Florida coined it.
Keywords: creative class, development, Research Triangle, tech hub, universities
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