Trip to Lowell

Site of the future University Commons building, linking North and South campuses, UMass Lowell.

Last week, our group traveled 45 minutes north of Cambridge to Lowell, MA to learn about the Merrimack Valley Sandbox and hear about the expansion of UMass Lowell. 

Lowell is an old New England industrial city, in fact the oldest industrial city in the nation, and the 19th century red brick mills dot the landscape, next to the small canals whose water used to provide the power for these operations.  In one of these old mill buildings exists the Merrimack Valley Sandbox, an effort started by the Deshpande Foundation and headed up by Todd Fry, one of the two executive directors of the effort.  We met with Todd and Theresa Park, the head of economic development for the city of Lowell to hear about the work each of them is doing and to learn about innovation as they define it, and to understand the relationship between the work of the Sandbox and the city of Lowell.

Lowell is a city of industry and successive waves of immigrants who have chosen this city.  Interestingly, one of the newest groups to make this place home are Iraqis, refugees from the war, typically very highly educated.  

One of the goals of the Sandbox is to further the entrepreneurial spirit among these immigrant groups --  people who might otherwise pursue a version of the American Dream that is lower risk, more secure, more predictable.  The Sandbox does this through events like Pitchfests, and Todd stressed that the experience is the most important part of what they promote.  From these Pitchfests, ideas that seem promising, or people who have a strong grasp of a path forward can and will get further support.   But more important is instilling a broader notion of what is possible.  An outcome of this attitude is that social innovation may be as likely to occur as some technologically demanding product development like a new drug.  

After our talk at the Sandbox, we stopped by to talk with Beth Rubenstein, head planner for the UMass Lowell campus and former head planner for the City of Cambridge.  UMass Lowell is in a strong expansion mode -- with seven new buildings under construction on campus.  The statistics are staggering -- with the arrival of former congressman Marty Meehan as the head of the school, enrollment will have increased around 60 percent in about ten years, and the campus will go for a largely commuter school to something more akin to a UMass Amherst.  The growth spurt of buildings is matched by huge need for investment in the existing physical campus.  One of the great planning challenges that the campus has, but also one of its great opportunities, is to link what are in effect two separate campuses, a North Campus and a South Campus.  They will do this in part through the construction of a new building University Commons that will sit almost directly in between these two campuses and be a central gathering place.  There is a new effort to get people out of their cars and walking and biking more.  

What wasn't clear from the visit, and perhaps it still needs to be developed, is the level of articulation or coordination between the campus and the innovation space of the Sandbox, and for that matter the city of Lowell.  One of the striking things when talking about the Cambridge example of innovation is the role that MIT plays in all of it, and the porous boundary that MIT seeks to create between the academic world and the urban and/or commercial world that exists right off of its campus.