Abstract
This book, written from an urban planner’s perspective, is delightfully engaging. Couched against the backdrop of a thorough historical and natural geographic review, the reader is enlightened regarding how the current natural and built environment features in the Research Triangle Area were shaped by past events. Decisions made hundreds of years ago are linked through a trail of subsequent events to arrive at today’s unique features, advantages, and challenges that the area faces going forward in a global economy.
Several distinctive characteristics of the Research Triangle region of North Carolina that emerged from the compound influences of natural and historical events were capitalized upon by early planners in the region, beginning around the early 1950s. Geographically, the Research Triangle Park (RTP) site was chosen to inhabit a vast tract of loblolly pines growing in extremely poor clay soil, unusable for farming and centrally located between three University towns. The vision was to create an attractive site with covenants to ensure a sustainable park-like setting that was ideally suited to “accommodate large companies interested in protecting corporate secrets by sequestering employees on large self-contained campuses and in providing their employees with bucolic settings in which to work.” The park’s founders were wildly successful in attracting large businesses and the RTP area boomed, becoming one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country. However, lack of urban planning to accommodate and manage the growth has led to several emerging problems that must be solved.
The future success of the RTP is now uncertain, partly because the corporate environment has shifted away from demanding large, secretive compounds toward desiring a built environment that encourages more interaction and collaboration among employees of different companies. The new model, now being adopted by competitive planners in other cities around the globe, is to provide dense, culturally diverse, vibrant, walkable communities with a blend of workplaces, homes, public transportation systems, meeting places, shops, and services. The new model is more amenable to diversity and free exchange of ideas, stimulating a more collective creativity and entrepreneurship on which modern knowledge-based industries thrive. The future of RTP will be determined in part by how it adapts to the paradigm shift that has occurred in the requirements for land uses and planning, which may necessitate changes to the covenants that rule land use in the RTP. These historical covenants have led to a large, uniformly developed or mostly undeveloped “hollow core” in a triangle region surrounded by vast urban sprawl.
As a consequence, a serious factor impacting the future of the RTP is the looming specter of transportation gridlock. Because the broader RTP region has developed as four separate cities, each with their own planning and transportation needs and ruled by separate county governments, building a region-wide coalition to deal with intertwined development and transportation problems has been very difficult. The transportation problems stem in large part from the low-density, sprawling nature of development in the RTP region, which emerged as a direct consequence of the “hollow core” RTP planning model. Sprawl in the triangle now ranks among the worst in the country, and the problems of pollution and environmental degradation that accompany it are described in this book along with other problems such as overcrowded schools and lack of public spaces.
With lack of coordination among cities and counties in their planning of land use and transportation, and competition among them to garner new development projects, parcel development has spread far from RTP’s hollow-core center. This sprawl has resulted in long commutes by RTP workers who clog the interstates and freeways, making the triangle region one of the worst to traverse from a long-haul trucker’s perspective. There have been recent efforts to infill vacant tracts around RTP with more mixed land use developments, but these have faltered because plans to build a light rail connecting the region remain in a state of flux. Without a final decision on exactly what the routes will be, developers are hesitant to build mixed communities which would ideally be situated along the transit lines. This sort of coordinated development of transit and built environment is seen as the best means to avoid the eventual transportation gridlock that will occur in its absence.
Slowly, coalitions are building that cross city and county boundaries to tackle these planning and transportation infrastructure problems in this booming metropolitan area. In the past decade, several mixed land use communities have been developed around the triangle. Also, unscrupulous developers who seek to avoid city jurisdictions and land use regulations by developing sites right outside city boundaries are facing greater difficulty than they have in the past. At the time the book went to press, only Durham had allocated funds for light rail construction. More recently, voters in Durham overwhelmingly approved a transit tax to support development of a transit system, and Raleigh and Chapel Hill voters are following suit. Perhaps with the dissemination of this book, the impetus for change will increase. The book ends with a challenge to regional planners, demanding strong leadership of coordinated, collaborative regional efforts if the RTP area is to retain its high ranking as one of the best places to work and live in the United States.