“Brain Magnet”: Research Triangle Park and the Origins of the Creative City,1953-1965 1

Abstract

This essay aims to historicize urban theorist Richard Florida’s influential formulation of the “creative class” by focusing on the emergence of a high-tech economy in North Carolina’s Research Triangle metropolitan area. In the 1950s, a powerful coalition of academics, businesspeople, and politicians launched a plan to move the state away from its traditional reliance on low-wage industries by founding a research park between Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, believing that scientific firms would value the park’s proximity to several nearby colleges and universities. The essay argues that local boosters emphasized the area’s cultural opportunities and intellectual climate as major quality-of-life considerations not only for high-tech companies, but also the scientists and engineers that they hoped to employ. Research Triangle Park thus created a blueprint for subsequent development strategies—later promoted by Florida, among other scholars and consultants—that made arts, education, and other cultural institutions central to the marketing of an urban area’s identity.