There are innovation poles that urban planners design in their studies by drawing lines on paper, but there are others that are configured without much planning, thanks to the sum of a series of isolated decisions and mere coincidence.
In Barcelona, ??an obvious example of the former would be the 22@ technological district, a project that continues to be successful, despite occasionally needing corrections. And a case that could fit with the second assumption would be in the innovation hub that is being configured along the Ronda de Dalt, on the Barcelona side of Collserola.
Let’s see how it has been shaped. In 1981, the Science Museum of the Fundació la Caixa was added to the scientific faculties of the UB and the UPB-UPC (first it was the Universitat Politècnica de Barcelona), reformulated two decades later as CosmoCaixa. In 1997, the Barcelona Science Park was created and, in 2005, together with the UPC, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) took shape, one of the crown jewels of research in the Catalan capital, always in the process of expansion.
In this same continuum of talent are the hospitals, with Vall d’Hebron as an international reference, and the ambitious project to move the Hospital Clínic to the upper part of Diagonal, where the UB sports area is now located.
Without forgetting, despite its location on the high mountain (the highest point on the Horta-Cerdanyola road), the Valldaura Labs of the Institut d’Arquitectura Avançada de Catalunya (IAAC), another global reference center. Or, jumping to the Vallès slope, the UAB in Bellaterra and the ALBA synchrotron.
But it will probably not arrive until 2025, when the first modules of the CaixaResearch Institute begin to open, when this axis of innovation that has developed for half a century at the foot of Tibidabo will be considered fully configured.
This great facility of the Fundació la Caixa, a personal project of its president, Isidro Fainé, will be the first research center in Spain dedicated to immunology and will obviously have international projection. The institute, which will be completed in phases over the coming years, will occupy a space of 20,000 square meters and employ 700 people.
Beyond its relevance in the field of research, this project can also make a notable contribution to Barcelona’s commitment to becoming a city where art, science and technology make joint proposals.
In fact, the associated urban reform will mean that the new research institute and the CosmoCaixa are part of the same complex. It will be difficult for shared lines of work not to be established between scientists and humanists in an institution that is already committed to the binomial of art and science through its line of exhibitions (there is the successful Art and Nature of CaixaForum).
In any case, it will be interesting to see how in the next few years a new map of the Barcelona of innovation (scientific, technological, artistic and social) is being drawn, in which the brand new axis of Collserola interacts with poles like that of Glòries/22 @; the Citadel of Knowledge; the old Sant Pau Hospital; the Raval neighborhood (CCCB-Macba); the cultural mountain of Montjuïc and other hubs more outside the radius (Besòs and the renovated Zona Franca) or metropolitan areas, with L’Hospitalet as the main point of reference.
Now you just need to believe it, keep these potentialities in mind before joining the discourse of stagnation, urban decay and misguided comparisons with cities whose models of coexistence or development have nothing to do with that of Barcelona.
