🔒Worcester well positioned for next economic revolution

Editor’s note: This column was first published as part of the materials for Worcester Homecoming, a new event planned by community leaders, including WBJ Publisher Peter Stanton, where prominent people with ties to the region were invited back to be shown Worcester’s progress and engage with its future.

There’s so much about Worcester unique among midsized cities: its eight colleges and universities; its strength in cutting-edge medicine and life sciences; the dozens of diverse cultural communities who call the city home; and its position at the heart of a vibrant, verdant region and commonwealth, represented in the Worcester seal itself.

Yet, there are many chapters in Worcester’s story it shares with places across New England and the northern United States. The evolutiåon of these older industrial cities, or mill cities as they’re often known in the Northeast, offers important guidance on their future.

My personal connection to Worcester comes from growing up close by in Oxford. Like a lot of Central Massachusetts residents, my family had ties to the region’s mill cities. My father began his career at U.S. Steel in south Worcester, before working at manufacturing firms in Holyoke, Clinton, Waterbury, Conn., and Manchester, N.H. He grew up in Haverhill, where my grandfather, a Lawrence native, worked for many years at a shoe factory. My great-great-grandfather came to Worcester from Quebec in the mid-19th century to work as a bricklayer. 

At that time, Worcester was booming amid the first industrial revolution, as steam-powered factories in cities like Lowell and Fall River turned cotton and wool into textiles. Worcester wasn’t located along a major waterway, but the city specialized in producing the machines those factories used. Worcester was a major distribution point for manufactured goods, first via the Blackstone Canal, and later railroads to Providence and Boston. These advantages positioned Worcester for even greater economic success in the second industrial revolution in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when mass production techniques helped the city develop a wide range of manufacturing specializations such as wire and metal grinding.

In the postwar period, rising globalization and technological change in the third industrial revolution left Worcester and other New England mill cities behind. Worcester’s population, which nearly doubled in the first half of the 20th century, dropped by 40,000 from 1950 to 1980. The share of people employed in manufacturing fell by nearly half. This was the Worcester that I knew growing up in the 1980s, one characterized by abandoned factories, vacant housing, and a downtown bereft of commerce.

Even as it underwent these wrenching changes, the seeds of Worcester’s re-emergence were planted. The global economy is entering what many are calling the fourth industrial revolution, driven by the convergence of digital, biological, and physical innovations through technologies like artificial intelligence, genome editing, and robotics.

Worcester’s many assets position it favorably for this latest revolution: a strong cluster of life sciences and engineering research and innovative companies centered around institutions like UMass Chan Medical School and Worcester Polytechnic Institute; proximity to a major global city in Boston; and a population both highly educated and highly diverse, with connections to emerging markets all over the world. Major investments over the past two decades have reinvigorated the city’s urban fabric. Worcester has gained back those residents it lost from 1950 to 1980. 

For all their promise in this new era, Worcester and other older industrial cities still face major challenges around aging infrastructure, social and economic exclusion, and the legacies of neighborhood disinvestment. As it enters its fourth century, however, Worcester has newfound energy, a chance not only to show a new face to the fans coming out for the Worcester Red Sox, but also to ensure its next industrial age delivers lasting prosperity for all its residents and communities.

Alan Berube, a native of Oxford, is a senior fellow and deputy director at the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C.