Mack Paul: Co-author of Miracle Road on designing places where innovation happens

In the mid-1950s, North Carolina was one of the poorest states in the country. Its economy ran on tobacco, furniture, and textiles — all three in decline — and its universities were turning out talent that promptly left for somewhere with better jobs. Find bonus content and more on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/mack-paul-co-author-of-miracle-road Today the stretch of pine woods between Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill is the largest research park in the United States. The barcode came out of it. So did AZT, ultrasound, and AstroTurf. Our guest Mack Paul spent years working out how that happened. He’s the co-author of Miracle Road, a history of Research Triangle Park (known as RTP) written with his father — a journalist — and built on about 160 interviews with the scientists, planners, and politicians who were there. It’s out October 6th. Hundreds of research parks have been attempted, and most failed. RTP started later than Silicon Valley or Route 128, with no defense money, no entrepreneurial culture, and universities that were openly uneasy about mixing academia with industry. But it worked anyway. Mack’s answer to why is not what you might expect. The park itself was almost an afterthought. What made it work was a set of long, unglamorous commitments: a governor who went industry hunting, a community college system that promised to train any company’s workers for free, and a decision about desegregation that made North Carolina a better bet than Virginia — which is a big part of why IBM came in 1965. We talk about what made it take off, the challenges now as RTP tries to become something denser and less car-dependent, and what it takes to build a place people actually want to be. We also talk about what it’s like to write a book with your father. Bio Mack Paul is a founder of Morningstar Law Group in Raleigh, where he has spent 30 years on the legal and political machinery behind how places get built — zoning, land use, environmental permitting, public-private partnerships, and public financing for infrastructure, mostly on large mixed-use and urban infill projects in North Carolina’s Triangle region. He’s a LEED Accredited Professional and served six years as the public member of the NC Building Code Council. He sits on the NC State Design Guild board, has advised the modernist preservation nonprofit US Modernist, helped organize the “Build Raleigh Better” symposium, and co-founded a development company aimed at raising design quality in the region. He teaches Real Estate Development Law at NC State. Mack is the co-author, with his father, of Miracle Road: The Story of Research Triangle Park, published by Duke University Press. *** Premium Episodes on Design Better This ad-supported episode is available to everyone. If you’d like to hear it ad-free, upgrade to our premium subscription, where you’ll get an additional 2 ad-free episodes per month (4 total). Premium subscribers also get access to the documentary Design Disruptors and our growing library of books. New premium subscriber benefit: Get design and career support in Design Club Weekly Portfolio Club calls this summer helped our paid subscribers build portfolios that land great jobs. Experts joined us weekly to provide feedback, and we compiled lessons from each session into a portfolio design guide. We’ve launched a private Slack workspace…join now to connect with designers, product leaders & creative practitioners in our community. And get a behind-the-scenes pass to every episode with The Roundup, where each week we bring you insights and actionable tactics from recent episodes. You’ll also get access to our monthly AMAs with former guests, ad-free episodes, discounts and early access to workshops, and our monthly newsletter The Brief that compiles salient insights, quotes, readings, and creative processes uncovered in the show. And subscribers at the annual level now get access to the Design Better Toolkit, which gets you major discounts and free access to tools and courses that will help you unlock new skills, make your workflow more efficient, and take your creativity further. Upgrade to paid *** Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices