Speaker
Description
Barcelona's innovation district 22@Barcelona, shaped by the discourses of 'public-private partnership', 'public participation', and 'planning flexibility', has been promoted as an ideal template for neo-liberal practices in global cities around the world. Over the past 25 years, numerous literature critically examined 22@Barcelona(Piró, E. E. , 2016; López, J. A. M. , 2018; Martín-Gómez, A., & València López, A. , 2022), providing constructive insights into its role as a pivotal component of global neo-liberal strategies. However, most of them have either only demonstrated the negative impacts of 22@Barcelona or examined 22@Barcelona in a certain cross-section of time. This study attempts to provide a more temporally coherent and dimensionally comprehensive perspective, by 1)characterizing the dynamics of the development of 22@Barcelona over a long period of time and grasping the key points in which the socio-political, economic, and infrastructural vulnerabilities within the territory of the innovation district, and 2) examining various types of social experiments that have taken place in the territory of this innovation district and illustrates the possibilities of the territory. By showing this great tension between vulnerability and possibility, this study intends to provide a reference for the territorial governance of innovation districts in the global context. This study is a qualitative research, specifically, a literature study and economic statistics were conducted. The study elaborates on qualitative data retrieved from the official websites of the European Union and the Area Barcelona Metropolitan (AMB), allowing authors to materialize 22@Barcelona’s vulnerabilities by reprocessing secondary data on the economy, housing, employment, etc. of the within a broader temporal scheme. At the same time, through a detailed analysis of Barcelona's policy documents, electoral dynamics, and research literature over the years, the author comprehensively examines the spatial and institutional experiments within the innovation districts, with the intention of revealing the richness of the possibilities represented by the innovation districts as locally contextualized territorial laboratories. An emerging international framework of populist studies is employed, to elucidate the depoliticization-repoliticization process (Tarazona Vento, A. , 2024) of 22@Barcelona in the context of neo-liberalism, and to reveal the great promise of spatial innovation and the possibility of institutional innovation. This study ultimately concludes that 1) the reality of 22@Barcelona is far less successful than it is advertised to be, with a very fragile socio-economic and infrastructural infrastructure, as evidenced by the overexpansion of rental space, the spatial and temporal imbalance of construction activities, and the prominent gentrification. The year 2008 marked the turning point in the innovation district’s development, with the financial crisis serving as the trigger for the consequence; 2) in a deeply entrenched neo-liberal era,“place” has become increasingly important, because it is only through small-scale everyday practices such as community gatherings and local mobilizations that bottom-up mobilization can take place. --can generate new bottom-up institutional opportunities that offer rich possibilities for shaking up global neo-liberalism, as left-wing populism in Barcelona has done to shake up the neo-liberal discourse of 22@Barcelona. This study therefore draws attention to possible spatial and institutional practices within the innovation zones, and calls on a wide range of planning practitioners to utilize policy instruments as much as possible to provide good conditions for the development of these practices.
References
López, J. A. M. The city, a battlefield. Privatisation dynamics of urban spaces in one of Barcelona’s neighbourhoods.
Martín-Gómez, A., & València López, A. (2022). La crisi de l'urbanisme de ciutats globals: reavaluar 20 anys de transformació del sòl i activitat econòmica del 22@ Barcelona. Documents d'anàlisi geogràfica, 68(1), 0081-105.
Piró, E. E. TENSIONS BETWEEN NEOLIBERALISM AND THE PROVISION OF HOUSING.
Tarazona Vento, A. (2024). Megaprojects in austerity times: Populism, politicisation, and the breaking of the neoliberal consensus. Urban Studies, 00420980241246704.
| Keywords | 22@Barcelona；Innovation District；Neoliberalism Urbanism；Vulnerability；Possibility |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
