In recent months, the concept of a hub has become fashionable in Barcelona. With the future support of European funds, many administrations have wanted to give a boost to new hubs in the city and its metropolitan area. Through these innovation nodes, sectors such as health, mobility or fintech are to be promoted and Barcelona's position in the international panorama is to be consolidated.
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For Montserrat Pareja, professor at the University of Barcelona (UB) and expert in creative industries and entrepreneurship, the term hub must be understood as the confluence of different types of actors, from companies to administrations, around a specific thematic axis, such as technology, with the will to create synergies and promote innovation thanks to bringing them all together.
"They are completely in fashion," says the expert. Pareja believes that the current proliferation of these nodes is explained by the fact that promoting them allows them to make themselves known and position themselves internationally with respect to a specific sector and, thus, gain competitiveness. "Put a hub in your life and your city will stop being gray and unattractive to become a city that is on the map," seems to be the mantra of the moment.
In Barcelona, there has been a long-standing effort to develop these hubs ---before we would have called them clusters---. 22@ was the first attempt, aiming to create nodes specialized in technology, energy or design, but this idea was politically forgotten, Pareja points out. Years later, one of the hub models that has ended up working in the city is the one devised by the Barcelona Tech City association, with the success of Pier 01 as a sample of the value of bringing multiple agents under one roof.
The Barcelona Tech City hubs
The journey of Barcelona Tech City's hubs began in 2016 with the creation of Pier 01, a space intended to host technological startups in different phases of development, and which within a few months already had its 10,000 square meters of surface occupied. Its success encouraged its promoters to replicate the model in other buildings specialized in sectors, aiming to configure an urban campus with different Piers. The next one arrived in 2019, with Pier 03, which ended up becoming an extension of Pier 01 after its proposal to focus on the blockchain sector did not quite find the necessary audience.
In 2020, Barcelona Tech City announced the development of three new buildings, with the collaboration of different administrations such as the Barcelona City Council, the Generalitat, and the Government, and trusting that European funds will allow accelerating its expansion. The future Pier 05 will be located in the Barcelona Stock Exchange and will focus on fintech, and there will be two more buildings on Via Laietana, one in the former headquarters of the Department of Digital Policies, focused on health, and one in the Correos building, specialized in urban mobility and logistics.
For the president of Barcelona Tech City, Miguel Vicente, nodes like Pier 01 are poles of attraction for talent and for the generation and transmission of knowledge. Furthermore, they are a place for startups to showcase themselves to investors. "These four years ---since the creation of Pier 01--- have served to demonstrate the positive impact they have on the ecosystem," he emphasizes.
For the president of Barcelona Tech City, Miguel Vicente, nodes like Pier 01 are poles of attraction for talent and for the generation and transmission of knowledgeBeyond Barcelona Tech City
In Barcelona, the city council will create a hub to promote the blue economy in the renovated Port Olímpic, with a planned area of 7,500 square meters and an investment of 8.5 million euros. "It has to be a pole of innovation, generation of economic activity and quality employment, around 200 new jobs, economic growth with attraction of new talent and capacity to retain the current business fabric and boost it again," values the first deputy mayor for Economy, Work, Competitiveness and Finance, Jaume Collboni.
"The blue economy that we want to promote from the Barcelona City Council promotes the set of economic activities mainly linked to the marine environment that are carried out in a way compatible with the conservation of the good environmental status of aquatic ecosystems and favor sustainable social and economic development wherever they are carried out," details Collboni. A strategic sector for the city that will boost the Barcelona brand and aims to position it at a European level, with a direct impact on districts such as Sant Martí and Ciutat Vella.
Sant Adrià de Besòs will also promote a new hub, focused on sustainable development and peace, which will be located in the Tres Xemeneies building. It will be one of the projects that the Generalitat will present to opt for European funds and the mayor of Sant Adrià, Joan Callau, emphasizes that the project fully impacts the objectives of these aids.
For Callau, the future Tres Xemeneies hub will serve to bring wealth to the area, one of those with the most neighborhoods at risk of exclusion, and change the industrial fabric of the surroundings to boost it. The mayor adds that it must also allow changing the professional training of young people in Sant Adrià, better capacitating them and generating new job opportunities.
But these are not the only hub projects underway in the short term that have been recently activated. European funds are expected to be used to create in Catalonia a chip prototyping and design industry that will be a leader in Europe within ten years, taking advantage of assets such as the MareNostrum supercomputer, or to promote a reference center for audiovisual innovation and digital content production, which is intended to be located between Terrassa ---expanding its Audiovisual Park--- and L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, with the support of the respective city councils and the Generalitat. Institutional alliances have also extended to the Catalan capital, with the promotion of a hub of art, science, and technology in Montjuïc, which will draw on the numerous museums present in the area and the technological events hosted by Fira de Barcelona.