A critique of innovation districts: Entrepreneurial living and the burden of shouldering urban development

Abstract

This article critically investigates the global trend toward urban innovation districts, a distinctly 21st-century spatial form. Innovation districts are a place-based, economic development strategy to concentrate the actors, entities, and infrastructure considered essential to process and product innovation. Built on the idea that today's innovation requires continuous interaction, the design of innovation districts incorporates a density of living and working amenities to accommodate a 24-7 live–work–play environment. At the heart of the innovation district strategies are the entrepreneurs meant to benefit from the built-in supports that help them scale their ideas and introduce products to the market. Despite an embrace by policymakers, to date, there has been little systematic analysis and critique of innovation district strategies or attempts to understand them as tools of neoliberal urban economic development. This article tracks how planners and other city development officials endorsed innovation districts during the Global Financial Crisis. The districts were a stopgap policy measure to accumulate economic benefits while waiting for market activity to resume. Furthermore, this paper argues that the emergence of innovation district strategy points to new governance arrangements that shift the burden of urban revitalization onto entrepreneurs who catalyze growth through their consumption and production activities. The findings are based on content analysis, site observations, and interviews with the creators, implementers, stakeholders, and users of innovation districts in Boston, St. Louis, and Dublin.