unplanned, and is in large part an artifact of the area’s proximity to the MIT campus.
“Novartis recently came and built its global research headquarters here,” notes Rowe. “That was great. But did we do any marketing, or did we just wait for it to show up? If you think about Kendall Square as the product that Cambridge offers to the world—the place where the city generate two thirds of its tax revenue and all of its foreign exchange, if you will—then you might want to step back and say ‘Let’s have a product strategy.’ But until now, Kendall Square didn’t even have its own website.”
Achieving a reasonable balance of infrastructure, services, and amenities—and thereby attracting tomorrow’s businesses and residents—will require an organized approach to managing the neighborhood’s growth, Rowe believes.
In particular, Kendall Square organizations need to be part of the discussion around Alexandria Real Estate Equities’ plans to build 1.2 million square feet of new biotech lab and office space along Binney Street, Rowe says. While groups such as the East Cambridge Planning Team—a nonprofit neighborhood association focused on urban planning issues—have given area residents an important voice in the planning and permitting process for the Alexandria project, businesses in Kendall Square have brought little to the discussions so far, Rowe says.
“We are talking about redesigning a whole slice of Kendall Square,” Rowe says.
In order to contribute intelligently to the city’s continuing negotiations with Alexandria over the final form of the project, the association hopes to develop a 20-year plan identifying what long-term neighborhood improvements members would like to see. That could including anything from placing more bike lanes on the streets to encouraging the development of restaurants, galleries, cafes, and other businesses that stay open later, thereby creating safer, more inviting pedestrian corridors.
“If you have a vision, you have a basis from which to speak,” Rowe says. “You can say ‘We support this, and this is what it needs to look like.'” And that’s a function that larger organizations like the Cambridge Chamber of Commerce can’t fulfill, he says. “The Chamber of Commerce is very good at what they do, but what they don’t do is think about street corners—about where we need crossings, or how the Alexandria development should be designed.” That’s where neighborhood-level organizations come in, Rowe says.
