Why Cerdanyola Knowledge City?
Cerdanyola del Vallès has in its municipality the first large concentration of large wingspan research facilities in Southern Europe, as well as knowledge companies (those whose business lies in the production and distribution of knowledge and not in the production and distribution of objects).
Among the different agents existing in the city (1), it is worth highlighting the presence of two nerve centres: the campus of a university of international excellence such as the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and the only synchrotron light source that exists in Spain and one of the most recent built in Europe, the ALBA Synchrotron.
At this point, it should be highlighted that the emergence of the so-called knowledge economy has led the university to increasingly assume functions that, beyond the teaching and research that are presupposed, make the institution an essential resource for the territory in which it is located.
In this context, thanks to its presence, the local territory becomes important as a place in which innovative media specialized in knowledge are born.
Cerdanyola is hence a strategic enclave for the strengthening of the country's economy adapting it to the scientific and technological revolution. All this attending, at the same time, to the need for quality job creation.
It is therefore a territory that, under a multi-modal and multi-nodal paradigm, has the necessary ingredients to compass mutual complementarity between the different agents that form part of it. A region that not only proposes an attractive framework for public and private investment of high added value (which encourages higher education, which promotes the training and growth of knowledge-based companies and other leading organizations belonging to the tertiary sector) but also makes advanced scientific and technical infrastructures and services available to cooperation between university, business and society.
On the other hand, we cannot ignore the fact that the ability to make the transition from one technological paradigm to another, when the potential of a previous regime is exhausted, is the hallmark of a region of the quintuple helix (3) as should be the case with the metropolitan city of Cerdanyola.
Cerdanyola del Vallès is therefore a guarantee of effective interaction between University, Administration, Society, Company and Environmental Context; a paradigm of a city that walks towards the knowledge economy.