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This chapter shows how structural processes, policies, and national trends intersected with the particular history, geography, and reputation of the Boston area to produce the set of juxtapositions—between history and progress, tradition and technology, open-mindedness and exclusivity, meritocracy and equality—that characterized the physical landscape and political culture of the Route 128 suburbs and the political ideology of many of their residents. It reveals that homeowners' view of themselves in rural Lincoln and cosmopolitan Newton fueled grassroots activism on a range of liberal issues. This sense of individual and collective distinctiveness simultaneously made many residents see themselves as separate from, and not responsible for, many of the consequences of suburban growth and the forms of inequality and segregation that suburban development fortified.

Boston's Route 128 illustrates the concepts of regional technology capability, technology genealogy, and technology roadmap. Precision machining and complex product systems are regional technological capabilities that have been redefined, and product applications have evolved through a series of technology domain transitions from the mechanical to the electrical and electronic, and via an extension of Moore's Law into the age of nanotechnology and self‐assembly processes. Old industries have gone and new industries have emerged through a regional systems integration process reminiscent of Schumpeterian ‘creative destruction’. The recent transition from a vertical integration to an open‐systems business model has fostered a regional capability to rapidly integrate and reintegrate activities and technologies required for rapid new product development in complex product systems.

This introductory chapter describes the myth of Massachusetts exceptionalism in the context of suburban liberalism, and provides a brief overview of Massachusetts politics in general, particularly what it means to be a “Massachusetts liberal.” In particular, the chapter states that the suburban liberals in the Route 128 area have stood at the intersection of the political, economic, and spatial reorganizations that occurred in the United States since 1945, but they have been largely left out of the traditional frameworks of twentieth-century political and urban history. Yet the chapter argues that liberal activism in the Route 128 area illuminates several key factors about the nature of suburban politics and the relationship between national developments and the particularities of political patterns in Massachusetts.

This chapter concentrates on a series of conflicts over affordable housing that took shape during the late 1960s and early 1970s that pitted traditionally liberal causes like civil rights and environmentalism against each other. At the outset of the 1970s, several observers identified “opening up the suburbs” as “the major domestic social and political battle of the decade ahead.” However, the Route 128 suburbs had stood on the front lines of what experts had deemed “The Battle over the Suburbs.” These controversies and their outcome ultimately show that liberalism did not stop at the proverbial driveway of local residents, and instead expose the continuities in and adaptations of the political culture of the Route 128 suburbs and liberalism more broadly in the 1970s.

This chapter presents a new model of technology management and regional innovation based on the principle of systems integration. The principle of systems integration is manifested in the organizational capability of firms — individually and networked — to foster rapid technological change. The effect is a network or cluster of entrepreneurial firms in which design is decentralized within the enterprise and diffused amongst networked enterprises. The combination of entrepreneurial firms and inter-firm networks fosters a range of dynamic cluster processes that, in turn, underlie the growth of Silicon Valley and the unexpected resurgence of Boston's Route 128.

This chapter shows the early emergence of Silicon Valley and Boston. Much has been made of the cultural differences between Silicon Valley in the Bay Area and Boston's Route 128. The chapter digs beneath this surface portrait, discerning which organizations are most generative. It looks at the structural differences between two leading technology hubs. Using patent data that capture inventor networks, the chapter highlights the importance of careers. It also reveals much greater information flow and career mobility across organizations and industries in the Valley than in Boston. This movement of people and ideas was spurred by the critical intermediary roles of certain institutions which functioned like the anchor tenants that were the pollinators in the biotechnology clusters in Chapter 14. The chapter thus argues that this anchoring of diversity is central to the formation of technology clusters.

This concluding chapter examines the recent trends in Massachusetts' effort to confront its image as out of touch with the rest of the country, turning to the themes of equality of opportunity and meritocratic individualism and how these had come to define liberalism. It shows that, in recent years, the Route 128 area had experienced a series of demographic changes which has since helped to lessen the pronounced whiteness in the Route 128 suburbs—but not the patterns of economic exclusivity. The chapter notes the improvements to the quality of life for Route 128's residents of color, noting however that such trends have yet to provide the solution to metropolitan, class, and racial inequities.

This chapter reveals that the fair housing movement in the Route 128 area created the grassroots support and legal means to fight racial discrimination through methods that simultaneously revealed the serious limits of suburban activists to solve the problems of systemic inequality. The agendas and policies of the fair housing movement grounded in the ideals of equal opportunity and meritocratic individualism led to the creation of pathbreaking new laws and a new outpouring of support for the cause. The movement, nevertheless, succeeded in helping only a handful of primarily middle-class African Americans move into affluent communities. While the results did have symbolic importance, they did little to alleviate the housing problems of the majority of Boston's African American population or patterns of systemic residential segregation. Thus, the fair housing movement contributed to liberal ideals and modes of activism and perpetuated larger patterns of residential and class inequality.

A new model of technology management and regional innovation based on the principle of systems integration is presented. The principle of systems integration is manifested in the organisational capability of firms, individually and networked, to foster rapid technological change. The effect is a network or cluster of entrepreneurial firms in which design is decentralised within the enterprise and diffused amongst networked enterprises. The combination of entrepreneurial firms and inter‐firm networks is shown to foster a range of dynamic cluster processes that, in turn, underlie the growth of Silicon Valley and the unexpected resurgence of Boston's Route 128.

Steps to improve the financing for small New England companies, together with developments in electronics, paved the way for a burgeoning new area industry. Electronics was a key growth sector in the mid-twentieth century. In the industry’s advanced segment, a new type of company arose as technical personnel left established research organizations to set up their own “spinoff,” or startup, firms. The Boston area was originally a spinoff center of secondary importance. But by the early 1960s, Boston’s “Route 128” had become the leading locus of technologically advanced industry. Spinoff companies near Boston outpaced their competitors elsewhere in part because of the greater support they received from local financiers. New England venture capitalists invested in some early Boston spinoffs. More importantly, the First National Bank of Boston and other commercial banks provided loans and other assistance. Financiers assisted the spinoffs in a conscious attempt to develop new regional industry.