Research Triangle Park needs to become “a mashup of Tomorrowland and the Magic Kingdom,” Bob Geolas, president and CEO the Research Triangle Park Foundation told the audience at the Moogfest Future Cities panel discussion Thursday afternoon.

If you drive to the park today “it’s kind of boring,”Geolas said. “It’s 7000 acres, half the size of Manhattan, and no one lives here. There are no personal connections to other people in the RTP, no relationships. We need to reinvent that. A lot of things need to change.”

When it was created in the 1950s and 1960s, he said, the park was designed as a futuristic place to work. At that time it was in line with the movement away from cities.

As the moderator, Ben Johnson, host of Marketplace Tech and the digital-only podcast Codebreaker, pointed out, “the future turned out different.”

The future is always different, Geolas agreed, and the question now is how to reinvent the park to encourage connections between people and what is going on elsewhere in Durham such as at the American Tobacco Campus and the downtown entrepreneurial hubs. “The question is how you make everyone feel part of the whole,” he said.

Low-tech can work

Wanona Satcher, CEO/Founder of ReJuve and Neighborhood Development and a specialist for the city of Durham, said that a lot of what it takes to make urban spaces “engagement spaces,” is relatively low-tech. She said it’s important to go into neighborhoods and talk face-to-face with residents and find out what they need.


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In one Durham neighborhood for instance, said there was no place to wait for a bus comfortably. So the community built a bamboo bus stop. “Bus stops may not seem all that important but there places where people engage,” she said. Another strategy for efficient and effective and inexpensive ways to create engaging urban spaces is to repurpose those already there, she added.

As Director of Resilient Communities for the policy institute New America,Greta Byrum oversees Community Wireless Networks for RISE : NYC, an initiative providing training, tools, and equipment for storm-hardened local WiFi to residents of six Sandy-impacted neighborhoods. She agreed that it’s important to be purposeful in thinking about spaces and how to prioritize people and their interactions.

In talking to people about why they needed a wireless network and what it might do for them, she found a major complaint that also involved buses. Resident said only one bus traveled through the six neighborhoods and they never knew when it would show up. “So we have an app that shows where the bus is in the neighborhood.

She also noted that it was important to build MESH network that was resilient and self-healing, that reroute around problem sections.

Reinventing RTP

The moderator returned to Geolas and asked him to elaborate on how the RTP is reinventing itself.

“It’s a massive project and the whole concept of neighborhoods and connectivity plays a big part what we’re trying to do.” Its current architecture of dated campuses without communal spaces can actually be forbidding, he noted.

Andy said it fails at telling its story effectively. “People drive through the park and have no idea of all the things that have come out of the RTP and help people all over the world.” It needs to do a better job of storytelling, he said.

The ongoing redesign needs to include housing for people at all levels, retail, and common spaces that offer people a reason to connect there, whether it’s art, programming, or great cup of coffee.

Satcher said narrative storytelling has become central to her work. “We want to create spaces that inspire people to empower themselves.” That often requires doing research to find out how to use with already there, and find multidimensional solutions to multidimensional problems.

Geolas continued, noting that the parks future story would be “a little bit grittier, more personal and less ostentatious. We want the park to be representative of the people we serve. We have a global brand but our purpose first and foremost is to serve the people of North Carolina. But it’s not an event, it’s a process,” he said.