Harvard and MIT: How Cambridge Became a Research Hub

Cambridge is a separate city from Boston, sitting across the Charles River, and it contains two of the most consequential research universities in the world roughly a mile apart. What grew up around them is arguably more economically significant than either.

Two very different institutions

Harvard, founded in 1636, is the older institution in the country and organises itself around a broad set of schools, from the college through law, business, medicine and public health. Its campus centres on Harvard Yard in the north of the city.

MIT, which moved across the river to Cambridge in 1916, sits along the Charles further east, with a campus built around engineering and science and an institutional culture that treats the boundary between research and application as porous by design.

The two are not interchangeable, and locals will be quick to tell you so.

Kendall Square

The most visible economic consequence is Kendall Square, the district adjacent to MIT that became one of the densest biotechnology clusters anywhere.

The mechanism is worth understanding because cities around the world have tried to copy it and mostly failed. It was not a plan. It was the accumulation of a research university with strong industry ties, a supply of graduates who wanted to stay, early biotech companies that located near the science, venture capital that followed the companies, and then large pharmaceutical firms that opened research sites to be near all of it.

Each of those steps made the next one easier. The result is a few square blocks where an unusual share of the world's drug development happens.

The Longwood counterweight

Across the river in Boston, the Longwood Medical Area concentrates teaching hospitals and Harvard Medical School in another dense cluster. Between Kendall and Longwood, the region holds an extraordinary combination of basic research, clinical practice and commercial development within a few miles.

That proximity is the region's real competitive advantage. A researcher, a clinician and a company scientist can meet in person on the same afternoon.

What it costs the city

The pressures are equally real. Lab and office demand pushes up commercial rents, which pushes up land values, which pushes up housing costs in a city with constrained supply. Cambridge and Somerville have both spent years arguing over how much lab development to allow and what it should pay for.

University land is also generally tax-exempt, which means a city hosting an enormous institution collects less property tax than the land would otherwise yield. Payments in lieu of taxes are a long-running negotiation and a long-running source of friction.

Visiting

Both campuses are largely walkable and partly open to the public, though building access is restricted. Harvard Yard, the MIT campus along Massachusetts Avenue, and the museums attached to both are the usual points of entry.

The Red Line connects Harvard, Central, Kendall and downtown Boston, which makes the whole corridor easy to see in an afternoon. Walking between Harvard and MIT along Massachusetts Avenue takes roughly half an hour and passes through Central Square, which is more representative of Cambridge as a place to live than either campus.