MIT-by-the-Schuylkill?

The Science Center's new plans to attract knowledge workers is long on hype and short on detail.

by Bruce Schimmel

The University City Science Center is not a place where even a vagrant would choose to live. Market Street from 34th to 38th streets is an ugly stretch of boxy buildings hemmed in by parking lots. It looks like a warehouse district. Even on a sunny January morning, there are almost no pedestrians. Except for lunch trucks, there are nearly no restaurants. At night, after 7,000 area workers leave, the neighborhood looks abandoned except for four lanes of traffic hurdling day and night, up and down Market.

In early January, the Science Center's new CEO, Dr. Pradip Banerjee, announced his intention to transform this lonely stretch of windswept real estate into Philadelphia's version of Kendall Square in Cambridge, Mass. He wants to build a community of knowledge where scientists would come to "live, work and play."

But when pressed for specifics, Banerjee would only say it's expected to cost "hundreds of millions of dollars" in private and public funds. Since then, the revised master plan that was promised for public inspection by the end of January has still not appeared. At the moment, the only thing that Banerjee appears to be building is a PR campaign to spend public funds while keeping the public and the surrounding community in the dark.

As a developer of livable communities, the Science Center has no experience at all. Forty years ago, the center began as a consortium of 34 area universities, with the goal of marketing discoveries found in their labs. But over the years, their role has shrunk to that of a real estate developer and a landlord with ample access to public funds. Most of its income comes from over 100 tenants in its 15 buildings; Penn is its largest tenant, occupying about a third of its real estate.

Before coming to the Science Center, Banerjee ran the drug and medical products group for the giant consulting firm Accenture. In September, he was hired to breathe new life into the Science Center's flagging commericialization projects, specifically those in its newest building on 37th and Market, the "Science Center Port."

Most of the 35 or so shirtsleeved scientists who crowded into the tiny cybercafe to hear Banerjee speak work in the Port. It was built in 2002 to be an "incubator" for startup companies. But many of entrepreneurs in the photographs that line the walls of the little luncheonette have departed. They started with 40; now they have 26.

Banerjee told the assembled scientists that he was in effect pulling their plug. With his new vision of commercialization comes a new metaphor. No longer an "incubator," the center would now be a "cultivator" with a more active interest in its startups.

The center will invest about $10 million to fund 40 new startups, mostly pharmaceuticals. To attract these new companies, Banerjee plans to build new laboratories and add between 1 and 2 million square feet, potentially doubling the center's current real estate holdings. Banerjee estimated about 30 to 40 percent of the buildout would be for laboratory space, with the rest for corporate, residential, retail and leisure purposes.

Why all these amenities? Adam Glaser, a senior architect for the project from Kling Associates, says the Science Center will need many amenities to make it attractive to today's knowledge workers. "Unlike workers in banking or real estate," says Glaser, "technology people want an urban space they can also live in, that's part of a neighborhood. They're more likely to be pedestrians. There are a lot of people who work in these parks who don't own cars."

In designing science buildings, says Glaser, "you have a new emphasis on casual interacting — where you can run into someone and have a eureka moment."

Keri Mattox would like a decent restaurant. Mattox, from Penn's strategic initiatives office, has assembled a coalition of institutions to be part of a new Keystone Innovation Zone to include the Science Center. She says that instititutions are calling for a "convergence center," a place with a restaurant and a social center with a conference room.

"At the end of the day," says Mattox, "you need to create a whole ecosystem — a social, business, funding and research environment."

Banerjee agrees that to attract knowledge workers "it's all in the right mix" of laboratory, leisure and residential facilities. But ultimately, he says of the new plans, "it's all about building wealth," not building communities. Getting scientists to move here is "secondary to creating 40 new profitable companies."

Would Banerjee himself be moving from his current home in Princeton? "Yeah," he replied, "there's a chance I'll be moving here. Sure."

It sounded like a slim chance. And as Banerjee walked off to find lunch many blocks away at the White Dog, I wondered if the new CEO was hearing what his own community, much less the community-at-large, was saying: Tax abatements and subsidized rents aside, if you build it ugly, they may not come.