Pittsburgh was one of the great American capitals of the steel industry.
Its American football team, one of the most successful in the NFL, recalls with its nickname the
Steelers
(the steelmakers, in Spanish) that legacy that the city, forced or by choice, has taken advantage of as a driving force: from mining it went to the steel industry, then came steel manufacturing and, after these, sophisticated industrial products.
Today it goes a little further and with its barely 300,000 inhabitants it strives to be a benchmark in robotics linked to artificial intelligence to definitively cross the threshold of the fourth industrial revolution.
More than 6,000 kilometers away, on the other hand, the large Spanish cities are fighting this battle of the knowledge economy without a clear path and with almost no major technological pole of the first order with which they can compete globally.
“Neither Madrid nor Barcelona nor Bilbao have a clear horizon of where they have to go in the next twenty years,” Ramon Gras, a researcher at Harvard University, denounces without hesitation.
He bases his statement on the fifteen statistical databases that he has used to write, together with his partner Jeremy Burke, a sort of urban planning manual based on data science entitled
City Science.
Performance follows form
(City Science. Performance follows form), published by Aretian's company and whose conclusions are based on the results obtained from a hundred cities.
Among them are the three Spanish metropolitan areas with a more developed economy and which are among the five with the highest per capita income in the country, but which at a global level do not fare very well: they do not excel in almost any economic activity despite having fundamentals to do so, they import more than they export and although they attract foreign talent, it is not of the first order, probably because they are not capable of generating projects with sufficient attraction capacity or the salary that they do 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 turning things around, as has happened in other cities of different sizes in the United States, is the ability to create ecosystems in which not only industry and universities coexist, but also in which a bidirectional exchange of knowledge and technology occurs to feed the virtuous cycle.
Innovation intensity in Barcelona and Madrid, measured by number of professionals in knowledge-intensive activities.
Deep red is the lowest level, deepest blue is the highest.Aretian
The general trend in Spain, however, is the opposite: compartmentalization.
The case of Madrid is paradigmatic, according to Gras, "with a very strong zoning": industry is located in the southern belt, the university in the northwest, services and large corporations in the axis of the central neighborhoods, Salamanca and Paseo de la Castellana and the technological campuses of Telefónica, Ferrovial and Acciona — “a little old-fashioned, created in the 2000s but with a model from the seventies,” he describes them — are far from both the university and the companies.
Its financial power is not fully taken advantage of, nor the fact that it has the largest European construction companies or the telecommunications sector that Telefónica represents.
“The optimal thing would be for there to be four or five areas in which universities, innovation transfer entities, startup incubators
,
large value-added technology companies and industry come together, 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 College of Architects of Madrid, who attributes it to the inbreeding of Spanish universities and their limited budgets, incomparable to those of the most prestigious centers in the United States. Joined.
Likewise, he explains that the evolution of large corporate cities does not have a technological component because they were the result of “real estate operations to valorize assets in the city center”: extracting capital gains from the center and rationalizing spending in the suburbs.
But despite everything, Ezquiaga emphasizes that Madrid is on the list of large global cities, with great weight in the financial sector and capable of attracting foreign multinationals and real estate investments.
Broadly speaking, Barcelona is attacked by the same problem and suffers its consequences.
One of its great pros is its diversification and one of its great cons is the absence of peaks of excellence.
The risk of relocation remains high for outdated activities and 20% of the manufacturing industry located in the area of influence of Barcelona is at risk of disappearing.
In Madrid this percentage reaches 30% and in Bilbao, 15%, according to Aretian data.
And despite Barcelona having become a
startup
incubator , only 20% of these are knowledge-intensive.
Gras considers that in a normal innovation ecosystem this percentage rises to 70%.
Aretian's analyzes indicate that of the 750,000 workers in the Catalan capital, only 12% work in knowledge-intensive activities and Madrid can be one or two points above.
In short, a low proportion compared to other cities.
Paris, to give a European example, is around 20%.
According to the company's projections, Barcelona will create around 27,000 innovative jobs by 2020, far from the 70,000 necessary to reach that 20%.
In Madrid, forecasts indicate that of the 80,000 jobs that will be created, only 20,000 will be intensive, when 140,000 would be necessary.
In the Catalan case, one of the causes of low efficiency is the division of one of the most representative areas of Barcelona, health-pharmacy (with a good number of pharmaceutical companies and reference hospitals), into more than nine different poles, when due to size the Catalan city should pursue two or three innovation centers in order to be able to compete efficiently with the critical mass in research of other large cities.
Boston has three that complement each other, a kind of path to excellence.
“The risk in Barcelona is wanting to do everything and end up being mediocre at everything,” says Gras, whose company has participated in the design of two large areas in the large Catalan metropolitan area to continue growing.
One is located in the border area between Esplugues and the entrance to Barcelona, around the current Sant Joan de Deu hospital and the future location of the Hospital Clínico, now cloistered in the center of Barcelona, but also the next university hub and companies. that can be installed, like AstraZeneca, which has already announced its interest in investing 800 million euros in a center for the development of 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 Germans Trias i Pujol in Badalona, around which around twenty companies have already been created taking advantage of its pull in the fields of cancer, leukemia, genetics and viral research.
Aretian is betting that it will gain space of influence by eating up the existing warehouses of Asian products a few kilometers down the slope and its area of influence will reach the three chimneys of Sant Adrià del Besòs, one of the few free areas of Barcelona's urban continuum.
Their calculations estimate that this new center could generate 32,000 employees (four times more than the current number).
Now the great axis of knowledge in Barcelona is located in 22@, the latest urban success in Barcelona, within which 60% of companies are dedicated to innovation.
But after 20 years it has aged and the City Council is considering modifications just at a time when the binge of office promotion (many still empty) in recent years threatens to become a problem.
“22@ is the closest thing to an innovative district, but mistakes were also made, such as not taking into account gentrification or the development of more housing,” says Miquel Barceló, whom many point to as the intellectual architect of that neighborhood and who has concentrated his knowledge on the subject in
innovative Districts
(Pyramid).
One of the questions that Barceló raises is that, as happened with 22@ until the City Council finalized the formula, the technological districts can have their own governance.
The technology parks of the Basque Country have a good reputation among the Spanish industry.
Xabier Arruza, coordinator of Bilbao Urban, believes that the Basque Government has done his job: he made the diagnosis and opted for certain fields of work, betting large amounts of money.
He now remembers that the Vizcaya Provincial Council is converting the former BBVA headquarters, Torre Bizkaia, to transform it into a meeting point for
startups
, companies, investors and technology centers with the presence of other international entities to attract talent.
Or the Zorrotzaurre project, where it is planned to create an artificial intelligence center.
“But can we offer with all this that the talent that has left returns?
It is an opportunity, but we need big companies.”
Seeing recent developments, Gras does not entrust the future of innovation to large cities.
“The medium-sized cities are the ones that emerge: Boston, Nashville, Austin or Madison, which is one of the leading cities in patents because they have focused on medicine and engineering and do more than Barcelona despite having barely half a million inhabitants.”
For this reason, the urban planner is betting that Bilbao aims to have 250 robotics companies and 50 with a leadership nature.
And strengthen his university muscle, another of the deficits that his models point out.
It is the city that has had the most success in saving its industrial weight, which is 23%, and that maintains a good group of fine manufacturing.
That's why he still hopes it can become the Pittsburgh of Europe.
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