Seattle, WA – its distinctive needle-point skyline houses a hub of technological innovation. Image: Howard Ignatius
Ask people who live and work in the American north-west’s metropolitan hub of Seattle, and there’s one thing you’ll hear again and again: the city sure is changing.
Maybe it’s the booming economy and all the people attracted to the area as a result: driven by entrepreneurship and innovation, Seattle was America’s fastest growing major city in July 2013. By May of 2015, it was growing at 2.1 per cent annually and still ranked in the top five.
Or maybe it’s the new construction popping up all over the city. Following the Global Financial Crisis and the housing market crash of the late 2000s, you could walk around downtown without seeing a single crane on the skyline.
Today, brand new high-rises are a common sight, especially around the internet retailer Amazon’s campus in the inner-city neighbourhood of South Lake Union.
Government is on the act too, with a recent expansion of the city’s Central Link light rail line that extends the service to the University of Washington, one of the country’s most innovative universities and one of the city’s biggest employers.
“Seattle’s brand is all about innovation,” according to a Sandy Burgoyne, co-author of the case study and Director of the Future Cities Collaborative, an initiative of the University of Sydney.
Titled Growing the Australian Innovation Economy, the case study reports on findings from a recent exchange program initiated by the Collaborative that enabled Australian councils to tour key urban locations in the United States, including Seattle.
“High quality urban places coupled with proximity to, and collaboration with, big tech firms such as Amazon and Google, and world-leading research hubs and incubator spaces are major drivers of the innovation ecosystem in Seattle,” the Collaborative study says. Calling Seattle the “world’s internet cloud capital, it also notes that “both Microsoft and Google are also friendly to start-ups and are active start-up investors.”
Change has long been a part of Seattle’s character. Founded as a logging town in 1869, it quickly grew into a significant Pacific seaport providing access to the resource wealth of Alaska. Aircraft became the main game in town after the Second World War, with Boeing still one of the top employers in the city, and since the 1980s ushered in the growth of Microsoft, Seattle has had a reputation as a coffee-driven boomtown at the cutting edge of technology and culture.
“Proximity to and collaboration across a diverse range of business verticals and talent is a huge competitive advantage and a key ingredient for attracting and retaining talent to this ecosystem,” is how the Collaborative study explains that success.
“Seattle has talent and innovation across e-commerce and retail, data technology, software, healthcare, biotech, travel and hospitality, real estate, telecommunications, food and beverage, and much more.”
One key hub of innovation identified by the study is South Lake Union development, which rezoned an area of warehouses and light industrial buildings, transforming it into a mixed-use high density neighbourhood underpinned by Amazon’s new campus.
The talent pool it attracted, spurred on by favourable planning and regulation measures, as well as comparatively affordable housing prices, attracted further growth, including in the biotech and medical research industry.
The Collaborative study highlights another Seattle success: the University of Washington’s CoMotion incubator, which it says “provides dedicated space and facilities to support UW-affiliated start-up companies through their early stages of company and product development.”
The CoMotion Incubator reduces costs for start-ups by permitting them to share facilities at the university, with an on-campus location helping UW faculty and students to engage with innovative companies.
“We deliver the tools and connections that UW researchers and students need to accelerate the impact of their innovations,” says Elizabeth Scallon, associate director of the CoMotion Incubator, according to the study.
The rapid change in the area has not arrived entirely problem-free, and local government is being driven by locals to address rising housing costs and congestion. But a stroll through South Lake Union gives a quick indication of how rapidly Seattle is heading into the future.
Impossible to miss in this fast growing neighbourhood are three gigantic, glass-encased balls: Amazon calls them Biospheres and plans to use them as greenery-filled office space.
In a city whose skyline already features the sci-fi Space Needle and the Frank Gehry-designed EMP Museum, which looks like melted plastic and was inspired by smashed-up guitars, the Amazon Biospheres still look like something beamed in from the future.
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