“Somewhere in the Andes, they believe to this very day that the future is behind you. It comes up from behind your back, surprising and unforeseeable, while the past is always before your eyes, that which has already happened. When they talk about the past, the people of the Aymara tribe point in front of them.”
Georgi Gospodinov
Planning ahead requires a great deal of humility. It would be lovely to predict what is to come with enough accuracy to design around it, but history suggests the opposite. Technologies evolve at ever more extraordinary speeds; human nature does not.
That’s a lesson quickly learned at Cambridge Science Park. The Park is now 55 years old. Europe’s first science park, it was the brainchild of Trinity College’s visionary bursar, Sir John Bradfield. Crucially, Bradfield did not attempt to predict the industries or technologies that would emerge there. He simply believed that if talented people could be brought together in the right environment, discovery and enterprise would follow.
Even he could not have imagined quite how profoundly that instinct would be proved right, nor how our world would change as a result.
Buildings appeared incrementally as the Park’s reputation grew. In the 1970s, the people working there had no mobile phones. Their sandwiches were not wrapped in biodegradable packaging. Many cancers that are now routinely treated were then quietly revealed to patients as a certain end to life. Scientific breakthroughs that made mobile phones, green packing and cancer therapies all came from companies and researchers working within the Park.
Cambridge Science Park has spent more than half a century demonstrating the power of innovation and the limits of prediction.
It is a real honour to be submitting a masterplan to take the Park into its next half century and beyond. In doing so, it has also been important to resist any temptation to design around the latest developments in science and technology.
Nobody in the 1970s was designing campuses for smartphone developers. Nobody in the 1990s anticipated the extraordinary infrastructure now required to power artificial intelligence. Ten years ago, blockchain was widely presented as the technology that would redefine society. Today, AI dominates that conversation. In another decade, something else almost certainly will. But what? Most of the scientists who will work in the Park in fifty years’ time are not yet born.
Our challenge is not to build for a future we cannot predict, but to design around the essence of humanity we know will endure. Like the Aymara, that means looking forward into the past.
Rather than trying to pick technological winners or follow the latest fashion, we focus on the conditions that consistently allow people and ideas to flourish. Humans are innately sociable. Creativity accelerates when it is communal. We think better in beautiful places. We live more healthily and happily when our work is part and parcel of exercise and fun. All these things were true long before science was considered a subject worth studying. Indeed, the more digital the world becomes, the more value we find in physical places.
That is why the lessons for designing a science park are remarkably similar to those for designing a successful town or village.
Most of Britain’s enduring places – from Cambridge and Oxford to London, Bristol and Edinburgh – were not planned around electricity, the car or digital technology. Almost all long pre-date these central features of modernity. Yet they continue to be extraordinarily successful, and continue fitfully – yet often brilliantly – to adapt, precisely because they were built around lasting human needs rather than transient technologies.
The Normans clustered their homes within tightly knit villages despite having open land all around them, because communities thrive through proximity and interaction. The same pattern is recognisable around the world. And if we were to doubt it, we can see – carbonised and vitrified – this historic reality in Pompeii, where shops, food stalls and other services were offered from the front of homes, built cheek to jowl. Good empirical science can now prove why this is the case: the Joseph Rowntree Foundation suggests that compact, mixed-use neighbourhoods foster stronger local economies; Transport for London points to 25% more social contact in walkable, compact areas.
Much post-war planning was built on the assumption that efficiency came through separation: homes in one zone, work in another, leisure somewhere else, all connected largely by roads. We are still living with the consequences of that mistake. Bradfield’s instinct was almost the opposite. Innovation happens when talented people with shared curiosity actively want to be near one another.
Which brings us back to science parks. As Jane Jacobs observed decades ago, innovation depends less on isolated brilliance than on dense networks of human interaction. Successful places create the conditions in which those interactions happen naturally and repeatedly.
Ironically, some of the world’s most advanced innovation districts are now rediscovering precisely this principle. Research Triangle Park — once characterised by vast, dispersed corporate campuses — is increasingly introducing residential density, amenities and shared public spaces to create a more social and genuinely urban experience.
The best science parks are communities before they are campuses. They are walkable, attractive and social places. They contain cafés, green spaces, cultural activity and opportunities for chance encounters. They create environments where conversations can begin without agenda or hierarchy, and where collaboration emerges informally between people from different disciplines.
This is not aesthetic garnish. It is fundamental to how innovation happens.
The buildings themselves matter, of course, but they are secondary to the ecosystem they support. Great science parks invest not only in laboratories and offices, but in incubators, accelerators, shared facilities and partnerships between researchers, entrepreneurs, investors and established businesses. They help create and then continually fertilize communities rather than simply letting commercial space. That is what transforms a cluster of occupiers into a genuine innovation ecosystem. Without that sense of purpose and leadership, even an attractive development can become little more than a business park with good landscaping.
Many of the world’s most successful innovation districts understood this from the outset. Kendall Square, Stanford Research Park, uCity Square in Philadelphia and Research Triangle Park were never conceived as finished places. They were designed as adaptable frameworks capable of evolving over decades as industries changed and new technologies emerged.
That adaptability is important because resilient places are rarely those that correctly predicted the future. They are usually the places designed flexibly enough to accommodate futures nobody foresaw.
The role of the architect, planner or developer is therefore (fortunately!) not to pre-empt scientific discovery. It is to create the conditions in which discovery becomes more likely.
That is also why a science park cannot turn inward and exist only for itself. It should contribute to the wider life of the community around it and help inspire future generations. In our case, the Cambridge Science Centre — already located within the Park — helps make STEM subjects accessible, engaging and awe-inspiring for young people. Alongside the masterplan, Trinity College is developing wider educational programmes across Cambridgeshire, including pathways into future employment.
The ambition extends to landscaping. Plans include a new public Park of Science running through the district, with interactive exhibits, play spaces and enough activity to occupy families and school groups for an entire day. The aim is not simply to create a workplace for today’s scientists, but a place that inspires tomorrow’s as well.
None of this requires a crystal ball. It requires confidence in something far more reliable: innate human curiosity, the compounding effect of human sociability, and the enduring power of place.
Technologies will continue to change at extraordinary speed. Human beings will not. The wisest are those who design with that distinction firmly in mind, looking forward into a well-tested past.