Beyond the city’s archaic paraphernalia — gothic towers, cream teas, prehistoric dons haunting the library stacks — there is little old-fangled about Cambridge. The exception is, perhaps, its overburdened traffic system, which at rush hour functions at a horse-and-carriage pace.

Cambridge is where the microprocessor in your smartphone was created and licensed; where Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe created the world’s first IVF baby in 1978; where, in 1953, Francis Crick burst into the Eagle pub on Bene’t Street to announce he and James Watson had found the secret of life — the structure of DNA.

Dozens of cranes now tower over this medieval university city, part of a building boom that will give rise to a planned 1,600 new homes a year, and one new dubious pun — Cranebridge.