22@ Barcelona Innovation District
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
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✎ Updated 26 Aug 2026 12 claims added. What changed →
Approved in 2000, the 22@ plan rezoned roughly 200 hectares of industrial Poblenou into an innovation district and rebuilt its underground services: a special infrastructure plan covered about 37 km of streets and laid fibre-optic telecommunications, waste-collection and electricity networks, alongside the Districlima district heating-and-cooling system. Backed by more than €180 million in public funding, the district became Barcelona's Urban Lab: delimited areas where companies could test technologies later replicated elsewhere in the city.
what does this mean?
The strongest source behind this entry is an independent peer-reviewed or academic study. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →📊 Impact
A peer-reviewed review of the plan's first fifteen years found delivery running well behind the promise: of the 4,600 social housing units expected, 1,520 had been built by 2010 and 1,600 by December 2014 — eighty more units in four years — while the share of land approved for transformation moved from 68.92% in December 2010 to 70.5% in December 2014. A sectoral real-estate study put 50.6% of the district's land as still pending complete transformation. The authors date the stall to the financial crisis: 400 companies moved into the district between 2007 and 2008, and only 61 between 2008 and 2009. The housing and land figures come from the city's own 2016 report '10 Anys de 22@'.
🎓 Lesson
The pipes were the easy part. 22@ put fibre, waste collection and district heating and cooling under 200 hectares of Poblenou, and that buried layer is what made the Urban Lab — and the city's later smart-city reputation — possible. The social half of the same plan moved eighty social housing units in four years against a promise of 4,600, and by the reviewers' own account the land came barely a percentage point and a half closer to transformation over the same period. A rezoning can be judged on what it built or on what it undertook to build, and here the two verdicts are not close.
Sources
📅 How old is the evidence?
Two clocks, kept apart: when this entry’s sources were published, and what has happened to its record in the atlas. Documented span: since 2000. 3 of 4 sources carry a publication date, from 22 September 2015 to 3 November 2023.
When the sources were published
- Metropolis (World Association of the Major Metropolises) · international organisationMetropolis — 'use: urban sustainability exchange' case study, 22@ Barcelona · updated 26 February 2018
- MDPI · researchGianoli & Palazzolo Henkes, 'The Evolution and Adaptive Governance of the 22@ Innovation District in Barcelona', Urban Science 4(2):16 (MDPI, 2020)
- Ajuntament de Barcelona · city governmentBarcelona City Council (Info Barcelona) — 'Districlima heating and cooling network...'
What happened to this record
- Sources last read
- Entered the record
- 12 claims added
Show your work What this page rests on and what it can’t tell you · all 12 claims with their sources · the forensic record
Evidence Passport · public beta 12 addressable claims, 4 source dossiers, one permanent baseline. The passport is unreviewed — an AI-assisted structural migration, not a human or expert endorsement. Every revision keeps a permanent copy under revision history.
Inspect the claims, one by one — verbatim text, sources and caveats for all 12
The text below is copied verbatim from the published record. Each claim names the source dossiers that carry it; caveats stay attached to the claim they qualify.
clm-8b32f5edc2466d55
quantitative
the 22@ plan rezoned roughly 200 hectares of industrial Poblenou into an innovation district
Sources carrying this claim
clm-5d3d2d1280ce55c4
quantitative
a special infrastructure plan covered about 37 km of streets and laid fibre-optic telecommunications, waste-collection and electricity networks
Sources carrying this claim
clm-af3bc8987a5870be
descriptive
the Districlima district heating-and-cooling system
Sources carrying this claim
clm-f1ac3d8e8b1d4ff4
quantitative
Backed by more than €180 million in public funding
Sources carrying this claim
clm-8ed68a85bb5223a1
descriptive
the district became Barcelona's Urban Lab: delimited areas where companies could test technologies later replicated elsewhere in the city
Sources carrying this claim
clm-c576db5103ee384b
quantitative
of the 4,600 social housing units expected, 1,520 had been built by 2010 and 1,600 by December 2014 — eighty more units in four years
Sources carrying this claim
clm-a9c110dac6ac6715
quantitative
the share of land approved for transformation moved from 68.92% in December 2010 to 70.5% in December 2014
Sources carrying this claim
clm-baa0330f1ede8a78
quantitative
A sectoral real-estate study put 50.6% of the district's land as still pending complete transformation
Sources carrying this claim
clm-62dc823d0bdc62d8
quantitative
400 companies moved into the district between 2007 and 2008, and only 61 between 2008 and 2009
Sources carrying this claim
clm-fc72612cbbfe22a5
quantitative
The housing and land figures come from the city's own 2016 report '10 Anys de 22@'
Sources carrying this claim
clm-1b5dc1b7d82b7ad7
quantitative
22@ put fibre, waste collection and district heating and cooling under 200 hectares of Poblenou, and that buried layer is what made the Urban Lab
Sources carrying this claim
clm-0b7081a0a80439e7
quantitative
moved eighty social housing units in four years against a promise of 4,600
Sources carrying this claim
Forensic record — source dossiers, gaps, hashes and the exact revision this page renders
This layer records what is known about each source, what is still missing, and the exact snapshot this page is rendering. A missing date, archive or hash stays visible as missing.
Awaiting operator and domain-expert review; publication of this revision implies neither.
Erratum on this revision's envelope. The snapshot, its hash and its permanent link are untouched.
- createdAt previously read 2026-08-27T21:00:00Z. The batching script that produced this revision advanced createdAt into the future to satisfy the strictly-increasing order the validator requires per entity. The value never recorded a real event; the corrected value is the moment the revision provably existed in the repository. Corrected to 2026-08-26T23:52:42Z on 2026-08-27; evidence: first appears in commit a8492f64da, committed 2026-08-26T23:52:42Z.
sha256:b85c85033d2e3ae0a33f14b2518cf9df693cc6c4ed18bb61663e435abcf7ff05
- 12
- of 12 claims mapped
- 4
- source dossiers
- 3
- publication dates recorded
- 0
- archives linked
- 0
- exact locators
- 0
- content captures hashed
Governance facts carried by the record
- Operator
- Barcelona City Council / 22@Barcelona
- Actor types
- city-government
- Funding model
- public
- Funding description
- Not recorded
- Cost
- Not recorded
- Ownership
- Not recorded
- Decision rights
- Not recorded
- Exit conditions
- Not recorded
4 source dossiers
Gianoli & Palazzolo Henkes, 'The Evolution and Adaptive Governance of the 22@ Innovation District in Barcelona', Urban Science 4(2):16 (MDPI, 2020)
- Stable source ID
src-0028767c0c7fc154- Publisher
- Name not classified · mdpi.com
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- 2020-04-11
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-07-25
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-27
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
Peer-reviewed, published 11 April 2020: the district equipped with fibre optics, a connection to pneumatic waste and spaces for climate-control systems as the precondition for Urban Lab projects; the social-housing, land-transformation and company-arrival figures; and the attribution of the stall to the financial crisis.
Metropolis — 'use: urban sustainability exchange' case study, 22@ Barcelona
- Stable source ID
src-4588b161c39d01fb- Publisher
- Name not classified · use.metropolis.org
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- 2015-09-22
- Updated
- 2018-02-26
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-07-25
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-27
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
Special Infrastructure Plan covering 37 km of streets and constituting fibre-optic telecommunications, waste-collection and electricity networks; over €180m of public funding; two hundred hectares of former industrial land, ongoing since 2000.
Barcelona City Council (Info Barcelona) — 'Districlima heating and cooling network...'
- Stable source ID
src-93886b2d7359ccea- Publisher
- Name not classified · barcelona.cat
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- 2023-11-03
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-07-25
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-27
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
Districlima district heating and cooling serving 22@ and Poblenou, with a further plant announced for 2024-2025.
- Claims linked
Smart Cities Dive — 'Case Study: 22@ Barcelona Innovation District'
- Stable source ID
src-3b462b8fbc901fb8- Publisher
- Name not classified · smartcitiesdive.com
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- Not recorded
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-07-25
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-27
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
Case study of the rezoning: 200 hectares of privately owned land, about 250 city blocks; by 2010 the district had 114,000 m² of new green space and 7,000 companies, businesses and shops. The page carries no publication date; the June 2011 dates in its text are the author's own access dates for cited works.
- Claims linked
Known limits of this passport
- Publisher names and source languages have not yet been classified; domains are recorded without guessing.
- Existing source notes are descriptive locators, not page- or paragraph-exact citations.
- A missing archive, publication date or content hash is shown as null rather than inferred.
- The project-level evidence grade ranks the strongest source in the entry; it is not a truth score for every claim.
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “22@ Barcelona Innovation District” — Barcelona, Spain. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/barcelona-22-innovation-district/ (last verified 2026-07-25). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.