Description
Across the world, innovation districts are being adopted as a disruptive but generative solution to post‑industrial decline and inefficient land use in urban centres and as an effective means of bringing inclusive economic dynamism, quality jobs, and improved
public spaces to city neighbourhoods. Their advocates often point to the pioneer‑
ing transformation of the 22@ District in Barcelona, Spain, the world's first such district. This paper challenges the celebratory discourse surrounding the Barcelona case, and with a critical eye on how innovation district transformation is conditioned by the prevailing global political‑economic context. It also chronicles how this transformation has continually ignited forms of class‑based struggle in Barcelona by embattled residents angered at how their own
neighbourhood has been used as an urban laboratory and site for speculative forms
of capital accumulation. Ultimately, this paper challenges the notion that ‘innovation’ is always and everywhere a beneficent force through a critical examination of the disruptive consequences of innovation district transformation, by engaging with the existing literature and by interrogating the dominant narratives that celebrate innovation districts as being universally positive. Instead, it underscores the tensions and contradictions inherent
in them while identifying them as being typical of what Jamie Peck has theorised as a late entrepreneurial conjuncture in global-urban political economy.
