Brain Magnet: Research Triangle Park and the Idea of the Idea Economy by Alex Sayf Cummings (review)

In 1868, when Jefferson Davis first articulated the idea that the U.S. South "shall rise again," he could not have imagined one of its forms as a high-tech university-business partnership in North Carolina. And yet, more than a century later, an unlikely band of suburban developers and university leaders envisioned and built the so-called Research Triangle Park (RTP) as a means of transforming what was once deemed "cornbread country" (p. 77) into an organized series of "knowledge work" towns and cities, one of which bore the nickname "Containment Area for Relocated Yankees" (p. 135). In Brain Magnet, Alex Sayf Cummings gives scholars and local historians a fascinating and well-written account of this historical moment and its importance for the historiography of technology and capitalism by "employing a distinctive method: refracting the story of broad changes in the nature of capitalism through concepts of space and place" (p. 6).

Chapter 1 analyzes the design and building of the RTP as a Cold War–era Southern creative city, a site of "self-invention and audacious boosterism" (p. 21). Coming to terms with North Carolina's transitioning postwar population trends (with many African Americans leaving the state) and socioeconomic woes (like low wages and poor schools), business elites partnered with university and government leaders to conceive and promote the idea of the RTP as a geographic enclave—"a concentration of technological and scientific infrastructure and of social capital which was possessed by skilled workers" (p. 47). Chapter 2 chronicles the rise of the idea of the "knowledge worker," as it was first embedded in and later drew strength from the paired view of the RTP as a frontier for creating a "whole new economic sector: research" (p. 56). Cummings observes that research was always meant to bolster the economy through expanding educational opportunities and employment, but he also suggests that the RTP's long-term success came at an early price. Planners had to make a "major compromise in their vision of an anti-industrial space for intellectual labor" (p. 67) by welcoming applied research powerhouse tenants like the federally funded National Environmental Health Sciences Center, as well as corporations like IBM and Technitrol.

Chapter 3 recounts what happened in the 1960s when more RTP knowledge workers came to live nearby: wealthy black executives and middle-class scientists struggled to reconcile boosters' promises of social enlightenment and good race relations with their own experiences of "blockbusting" in the new surrounding suburbs. Chapter 4 pairs analysis of the design of two 1970s-era RTP buildings—the Burroughs Wellcome Building (1971) and the National Humanities Center (1978)—as "profoundly rigorous and intentional" (p. 105) embodiments of new forms of knowledge work, engineered to house intellectual resources abstractly, as "brains in a luminous structure in a suburban landscape" (p. 119). Finally, the book's last chapters return to the cities within the Triangle—Cary (ch. 5) and Raleigh-Durham (ch. 6) as paired emblems of "the good boring life" and the further displacement that the RTP's gentrification mandate wrought. The RTP became, in one of the author's most memorable sound-bite assessments, "a Jetsons success in a hipster era" (p. 184). Cummings's epilogue returns to the figure of the knowledge worker, quoting and reflecting on its place in what a 2017 journalist deemed the "lanyard-based class system" (p. 198) of the twenty-first-century tech economy.

Brain Magnet, by the author's own assessment, "is in, but not of, Southern history. It is about the way we think about and imagine the economy, what the economy is, where the economy should go and, above all, who matters" (p. 17). In this way, Cummings's book both builds on existing studies of regional knowledge hubs (like Lily Geismer's account of Boston's Route 128 and Margaret O'Mara's work on Silicon Valley) and contributes new insights to...