Innovation District Development in Dutch practice

Abstract

This research explores the roles local public authorities can deploy in innovation district planning and development and the spatial conditions and interventions they should enhance to stimulate innovation through the built environment. Because cities are promoting and investing in new locations to agglomerate knowledge-intensive activities on a specific location, to raise the innovation profile of the area and accelerate urban economic renewal. Academics and practitioners question to what extent urban planners can appoint areas where innovation-rich activities might cluster and what strategies and organization these projects need to become more than a rebranding effort. This trend also becomes apparent in Dutch urban practice. Which drives this research to explore how innovation districts came into being, to what extent innovation is actually stimulated in these districts (focusing on the physicality of this phenomenon and the role of the built environment), and how they could be organized to enable and stimulate innovation and the processes leading to it.