David Taylor reflects on our recent Innovation Districts half-day conference, placing London alongside international case studies and examining the key challenges when integrating place-based districts.

The knowledge economy will be ‘at the centre of a new British renaissance’ in the UK economy if we can build a ‘self-perpetuating economic ecosystem’. And that will include creating clusters and spaces for people to mix and ideas to grow, perhaps following an inclusive model pioneered in Germany. That was according to Hammersmith & Fulham leader Councillor Stephen Cowan at Innovative growth – London as a global innovation hub last week.

Opening the NLA event, Cowan traced how White City had grown as an innovation hub following assessment of economies around the world, especially German city states that were given constitutional responsibility to grow their local economies. ‘And not just to grow it, because once you get an economy growing, it will take off by itself, to make it grow inclusively and to work for everybody in the surrounding areas’. That, Cowan went on, was why those cities had linked to things like infrastructure planning and lifelong learning. ‘We think that is a great model’.

 

The UK has ‘soft power’ instead, so the authority used it in White City to reach out to the media industry and Imperial College, which agreed that the German examples would be good to model in order to achieve an adventurous, innovative cluster. Octopus Energy founder Greg Jackson wrote the council a report which suggested they needed affordable flexible office space if they were to get a cluster or start-up and scaleup businesses, and to guarantee what Cowan branded a ‘bubbling energy of entrepreneurialism at the heart of our local economy.’ 

 

The White City area is now home to the largest amount of high value business investment in west London, where 60 life sciences businesses are now based - and that centre of gravity will keep on growing, suggested Cowan. ‘I fully predict in 10 years’ time people will talk about this part of London as the heart of Britain’s new Silicon Valley’, he said. Furthermore, this model of ‘ideas-based economic growth clusters’ can be rolled out across the country, offering ‘a chance to enter a new industrial age, if we get our act together’.

 

MedCity chief executive Neelam Patel provided an ‘umbrella view’ of London as a global innovation hub, emphasising the impact of life sciences on businesses and communities, particularly on medical breakthroughs in areas like cancer, but also through place-making, jobs, education, and healthcare provision. There is a key demand for high quality, well-located space, said Patel, to maintain mobility of companies. The White City Innovation District is ‘incredibly impressive’, but others within London are also of note, including at Paddington Life Sciences, the Knowledge Quarter, Canary Wharf Life Sciences, Olympic Park, and Innovation Gateway in Sutton, with Stevenage and Cambridge also offering locations for companies linking into the capital. But, Patel went on, it is a ‘noisy landscape’; there needs to be transparency about the right places for the right firms, rising health challenges are requiring innovation and there needs to be work done to regain confidence in the UK as a market for scale-ups and commercialization.

 

Justin Cratty, Global Sciences Practice Leader, Gensler said great cities offer the capability to have the ability to offer headquarter facilities, but how could other elements like spec laboratories, manufacturing, incubators and accelerators and diagnostic space be weaved in to create a thriving life sciences ecosystem? This was the goal of the IQHQ research and development district in San Diego, creating a ’new frontier’ for life sciences in five all-electric buildings, merging the harbour site with the city. Gensler conducted a report that found that sciences place outdoor space as a very high principle in development, so the practice used that principle widely across the site, along with employing a wide variety of uses such as retail, public art and in a mix of scales. Breaking down the siloes between sciences was also important in such ventures, Cratty added during questions, in order to get the right people in the room together to solve the world’s problems.

 

In northern Italy, meanwhile, the Milano Innovation District is a true powerhouse running to 1 million sq m, said Lendlease’s Stefano Minini, aiming to solve challenges of healthcare for the next 100 years through a public private partnership after the city’s Expo in 2015. Innovation districts need a particular focus, he suggested, for them to be successful. David Reay, development director of TV Centre developer Stanhope suggested that the geography of innovation has changed over the last two decades from ‘protective’ business parks to a more complex, multi-disciplinary picture of diverse teams. ‘That’s been fantastic for urban generation and places like White City’, he said. And while life sciences buildings are harder to get to net zero, sustainability is translating gradually into an improvement in asset values, Reay added. 

 

Other speakers at the event included Jodie Eastwood, CEO of the Knowledge Quarter, an enterprise she said has a ‘rare and unique diversity’ dating back to Sadlers Wells opening in 1683 and forward to rapid recent growth since the King’s Cross regeneration project. ‘We created the knowledge quarter as an organisation as a bit of an experiment’, she said. ‘We built a narrative vision and a community for the area, but importantly we built on genuineness’. If you are to develop true innovation it has to be cross-sectoral, she agreed. 

 

Sarah Elie, CEO of the Somers Town Community Organisation, added that although King’s Cross has changed markedly, sadly its indices of deprivation have not. The Knowledge Quarter was great, but ‘It hasn’t translated into the community’, she said. Knowledge, however, is the ‘greatest gift you can give anyone’, Elie added, and work still needs to be done to convince communities that educational establishments and facilities like the British Library are for them too. Finally, Jonathan Martin of Waltham Forest talked about establishing an innovation district and ‘leveraging life chances’ for its residents, whose population has risen by over 8 per cent since 2011 and which was hit hard by the pandemic. ‘It established for us a key moment; an inflexion point for us to establish what do we do as a local authority to really make a difference’, he said. ‘And that’s huge in terms of how we reset our priorities’.

 

Summing up the event, Cowan said that everything his council is trying to do is encapsulated in the architecture and fabric of the building RSHP is designing as its new home in the borough. But we need to build the towns, villages and cities of what the 21st century should look like. ‘I firmly believe that inclusive innovation districts, designed with people in mind right at the beginning, are going to be powerhouses of economic growth’.