Pittsburgh was one of the great American steel capitals. Its American football team, one of the most successful in the NFL, with its nickname “Steelers” (the steel makers in Spanish) is a reminder of the heritage that the city has used, forced or voluntary, as a driving force: through mining the steel industry, then came steel production and then sophisticated industrial products. Today it goes one step further and, with its almost 300,000 inhabitants, strives to be a benchmark in robotics linked to artificial intelligence, in order to finally cross the threshold of the fourth industrial revolution. More than 6,000 kilometers away, however, the major Spanish cities are fighting this battle of the knowledge economy without a clear path and almost without a large, first-class technological pole with which they could compete on a global scale.
“Neither Madrid, nor Barcelona, nor Bilbao have a clear horizon of where they have to go in the next twenty years,” denounces Ramon Gras, a researcher at Harvard University, without hesitation. He bases his statement on the fifteen statistical databases that he used to write a kind of data science urban planning handbook with his partner Jeremy Burke called City Science. Performance Follows Form (Urban Science. Performance Follows Form), published by his company Aretian and whose conclusions are based on the results of a hundred cities. Among them are the three Spanish metropolitan areas with a more developed economy, which are among the five with the highest per capita income in the country, but which are not doing particularly well on a global scale: they do not stand out in almost any economic activity Although they are over have the wherewithal to do so, they import more than they export, and although they attract foreign talent, it is not first rate, probably because they are unable to generate projects with sufficient appeal or the salary they pay elsewhere.
“The best in finance don’t want to go to Madrid, but to London or New York, and those who want to build a strong industry think of Munich or Stuttgart, not Barcelona,” says Gras. The key to the turnaround, as has happened in other cities of various sizes in the United States, lies in the ability to create ecosystems in which not only industry and universities coexist, but also in which two-way knowledge and technology exchange takes place in a virtuous way Circulation.
Innovation intensity in Barcelona and Madrid, measured by the number of skilled workers in knowledge-intensive jobs. Deep red is the lowest level, deepest blue is the highest. Aretic
However, the general trend in Spain is the opposite: isolation. The case of Madrid is paradigmatic, says Gras, “with a very strong zoning”: industry is located in the southern belt, the university in the northwest, services and large corporations on the axis of the central districts, Salamanca and Paseo de la Castellana and the technology campuses of Telefónica, Ferrovial and Acciona – “a little old-fashioned, created in the 2000s but with a model from the 70s,” is how he describes them – are far removed from both the university and the companies. Its financial strength is not fully exploited, nor is the fact that it has the largest European construction companies or the telecommunications sector that Telefónica represents.
“The optimal thing would be if there were four or five areas where universities, innovation transfer institutions, startup incubators, large value-added technology companies and industry converge, but the reality is that Madrid does not even have an advanced innovation system,” criticizes Gras. “The university-business cluster in Madrid does not exist,” admits José María Ezquiaga, former dean of the Madrid School of Architecture, who attributes this to the inbreeding of Spanish universities and their limited budgets, which cannot be compared to those of the most prestigious centers in the United States. Joined. Likewise, he explains that the development of large corporate cities has no technological component, since they are the result of “real estate operations to upgrade assets in the city center”: obtaining capital gains from the center and rationalizing spending in the suburbs. Despite everything, Ezquiaga emphasizes that Madrid is on the list of great world cities, has great weight in the financial sector and is able to attract foreign multinational companies and real estate investments.
By and large, Barcelona is affected by the same problem and is suffering its consequences. One of its great advantages is its diversification and one of its major disadvantages is the lack of excellence. The risk of relocation of obsolete activities remains high and 20% of the manufacturing industry in Barcelona's sphere of influence is at risk of disappearing. In Madrid, according to Aretic data, this percentage is 30% and in Bilbao it is 15%. And although Barcelona has become a startup incubator, only 20% of them are knowledge intensive. Gras expects this percentage to rise to 70% in a normal innovation ecosystem.
Aretian's analysis shows that of the Catalan capital's 750,000 workers, only 12% work in knowledge-intensive jobs and Madrid may be a point or two higher. In short, a low proportion compared to other cities. Paris, to take a European example, is around 20%. According to the company's forecasts, Barcelona will create around 27,000 innovative jobs by 2020, far less than the 70,000 needed to reach this 20%. In Madrid, forecasts suggest that of the 80,000 jobs that will be created, only 20,000 will be intensive, while 140,000 would be necessary.
In the Catalan case, one of the causes of the low efficiency is the division of one of the most representative areas of Barcelona, health pharmacy (with a large number of pharmaceutical companies and referral hospitals), into more than nine different poles. if the Catalan city, due to its size, should aim for two or three innovation centers in order to compete efficiently with the critical research mass of other large cities. In Boston there are three that complement each other, a kind of path to excellence. “The risk in Barcelona is to want to do everything and end up being mediocre at everything,” says Gras, whose company helped shape two large areas in the large Catalan metropolitan area to keep growing.
One is in the border area between Esplugues and the entrance to Barcelona, around the current Sant Joan de Deu Hospital and the future site of the Hospital Clínico, now located in the center of Barcelona but also representing the nearest university center and companies , which can be installed, such as AstraZeneca, which has already expressed interest in investing 800 million euros in a center to develop new therapies. According to their calculations, a mass of 52,000 jobs could be achieved, of which more than 40% could be knowledge-intensive. The second axis, also linked to the health sector, is located next to another leading university hospital, the German Trias i Pujol in Badalona, around which around twenty companies have already been created, benefiting from its appeal in the areas of cancer benefit. Leukemia, genetics and virus research. Aretian is betting that it will gain influence by eating up the existing warehouses for Asian products a few kilometers further down, and that its sphere of influence will extend to the three chimneys of Sant Adrià del Besòs, one of the few free areas of Barcelona's urban continuum . According to their calculations, this new center could generate 32,000 employees (four times more than currently).
Now Barcelona's great knowledge axis is in 22@, the latest urban success in Barcelona where 60% of companies are dedicated to innovation. But after 20 years it is showing its age and the city council is considering changes, just at a time when the spate of promotions seen in recent years (many of which are still unfilled) threatens to become a problem. “22@ is the closest thing to an innovative neighborhood, but there have also been mistakes made, such as not taking into account gentrification or the development of more housing,” says Miquel Barceló, who many consider to be the intellectual architect of this neighborhood and who has his Knowledge on the topic bundled in innovative districts (pyramid). One of the questions that Barceló raises is that the technology districts can have their own administration, as was the case with 22@ until the City Council finalized the formula.
The technology parks of the Basque Country enjoy a good reputation in Spanish industry. Xabier Arruza, coordinator of Bilbao Urban, believes that the Basque government has done its job: it has made the diagnosis and chosen certain areas of work by investing a lot of money. Remember that the Provincial Council of Vizcaya is renovating the former BBVA headquarters, Torre Bizkaia, to transform it into a meeting point for startups, companies, investors and technology centers, where other international companies are also present to attract talent. Or the Zorrotzaurre project, which plans to create a center for artificial intelligence. “But with all of this, can we provide that the talent that left comes back? It’s an opportunity, but we need big companies.”
Given recent developments, Gras doesn't trust the future of innovation to big cities. “The medium-sized cities are the ones that are emerging: Boston, Nashville, Austin or Madison, which is one of the leading cities in patents because it has focused on medicine and engineering and does more than Barcelona, although it has barely half a million Inhabitants.” For this reason, the city planner assumes that Bilbao aims to have 250 robotics companies and 50 with a leadership character. And they are strengthening their university muscles, another deficit their models point out. It is the city that has had the greatest success in saving its industrial weight by 23% and has a good group of fine manufacturing industries. That's why he continues to trust that it can become the European Pittsburgh.
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