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Weekly UpdatesInternational Education: One of the major issues identified was primary and secondary school education. The attraction of the District to both live and work will depend on the availability of suitable education, especially for the international community arriving in the city. 'Education' as an issue had several aspects. The level of English and other foreign languages spoken in the city is modest and there is a need to strengthen and extend English language training in schools and colleges and through associations, perhaps, given the history and context of Catalunya, even developing trilingualism in some fields. There is also a pressing need to extend the availability of international schooling--existing international schools are not easy to get to from 22@ and do not have either sufficient capacity today or the ability to grow. The importance of the issue of schools was summed up by several comments that this is the first thing that people ask before deciding where to live or even if to move to the city. The availability of such schools or the facility of existing local schools to cater for the international community will be a crucial component in attracting the skilled international workforce targeted.
Secondly here, engaging on a business to business basis was to be at the heart of the regeneration plan. In the event, the city and specifically the 22@ District needs to build more effective networking programmes--matchmaking events, Agoras, business breakfasts--and enhance the underpinning ICT services and infrastructure. Here again, language and connection are key: new ICT infrastructure should include the provision of a Portal with much more extensive business services rather than information and be multilingual throughout. The need to be able to easily meet with firms on their premises or in neutral third party locations would be enhanced by extending the current WiFi pilot to give ubiquitous internet access, especially within the 22@ Barcelona District. Resources that can mediate between these local agencies and international companies in the short term, while on a longer term basis rationalising the programmes they offer and enhancing their support in languages other than Catalan, are essential supports for connection.
The above issues rare relatively easy to solve. Enhancing the economic development programmes is more complex and constitutes a major challenge to all organisations thinking along local economic transformation lines. Over the last few decades, Barcelona has been a leader in terms of 'supply side' initiatives to drive economic development and this has been evident since the '92 Olympics, as the City Authorities and the Catalan Government have invested in universities, research centres, infrastructure and offered economic and fiscal incentives. However as noted earlier, views gathered in this study suggest that the supply side approach may need to be balanced with more on the 'demand side', using public procurement practices and competitions that encourage consortia between local and international firms, thereby more directly encouraging spillovers of knowledge and the development of social networks and expertise. Across all of Europe, particularly since the Lisbon Accord, cities are encouraging the formation of industry clusters on their periphery or as urban industry clusters in regenerated districts within the city itself. Most have targeted clusters to those on which Barcelona focuses: ICT, biomedical, digital media and renewable energy. There is thus considerable competition in these fields internationally. Barcelona may be assisted by the fact that it has an almost unique differentiator in that the 22@ Barcelona District offers a dense and well connected urban environment where such clusters would be packed together. This creates the opportunity to differentiate its industry clusters through cross-sector innovation, not just excellence within each industry 'pillar'.
Introducing Demand-Side Initiatives: The approach taken so far is consistent with the development models suggested by Fujita et al. (1999), and mentioned earlier in this paper, which suggest how diversity can be or is driving innovation. But taking this approach in turn requires explicit management of the spaces and provision of special amenities to encourage cross-sector innovation. Innovation can also be encouraged through 'demand-side' initiatives that seek cross-sector collaboration. These initiatives could include, for instance, leading edge electronic healthcare delivery and telemedicine that involves digital media, ICT, bio-medical engineering and life sciences or devising new pedagogical models for education delivery that involve all of these clusters. Both of these are areas where the city already has demonstrated academic, research and industry leadership and there is substantial public sector expenditure.
CONCLUSIONS
Barcelona's attraction for the creative classes is evident from many different market research studies. This is evidenced by the education and population data that demonstrates that not only are skilled members of the international community attracted to Barcelona but they are also already present in substantial numbers. The City authorities were concerned, however, that this important asset in terms of available human capital was under-utilised and that increasing the extent of its engagement with local firms and institutions and, at a social level, with the local community would greatly enhance the city's development as it transforms itself into a more knowledge-intensive environment.
The research and analysis we have undertaken support this view and indicate that cities that not only can attract but are proactive in engaging and connecting the international community with local firms and institutions are more likely to prosper in a highly competitive knowledge-intensive, networked economy.
The research reported here shows that the international community in Barcelona is itself seeking greater engagement and that the barriers for such engagement need to be pro-actively addressed. It requires much more in policy terms than just developing a city's amenities and attracting the creative classes. As Barcelona has experienced it at least, the jobs that have been created under the attraction policy tend to be in the construction sector and retail and leisure services, not the knowledge economy. The driver for this is paradoxically the desire of a well-educated, mobile international community for high quality housing and services to support the lifestyles that attracted them to the city in the first place. And with economic incentives to relocate, such as payment of lower taxes than in their home countries, their contribution to the public sector may be proportionately much lower than that of local citizens. For a city to benefit from its new arrivals, however skilled, it must be pro-active in first fully engaging them if it is later to exploit their capacity for innovation, knowledge transfer, and access to extended international social networks, all of which are viewed as crucial to Barcelona's future. While diversity in the work force and a constant supply of highly skilled people are important to maintaining or enhancing the innovative capacity of a city and avoiding a convergence in knowledge and information, success depends on the city's ability to understand the nature of its new asset and actively promote and use its skills.
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Nick Leon
Professor, Director--Design London, Imperial College, London, UK
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