ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at Smith's original focus on how rent performs a crucial coordinating role at 'the frontier'. It explores the more recent regeneration of the city of Barcelona realised under official guise of promoting knowledge-based competitiveness. In 1998, Barcelona City Council (BCC) and town planning agencies were considering how best to initiate a second phase of post-Olympics urban regeneration, focusing upon the district of Poblenou in line with the recent reform of the city's General Metropolitan Plan (GMP). The chapter highlights how speculative rentier practices fuelled the destructive process of crisis formation in Barcelona and, more generally, in Spain. It shows how the unevenness of, and limits to, knowledge-based urban transformation in Barcelona has been manifest not only in economic crisis but also in the sudden and everyday visibility of very different working subjects to that of the 'creative class' of human capital or 'talent' that were supposed to populate the new 'city of knowledge': the sans papiers.
