ABSTRACT
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania aligned to the smart innovation economy through an economic development strategy bolstered by spatially bounded tax breaks, exclusive infrastructure provision and a wholesale transformation of deindustrialised nodes into work spaces for this globalised economy. This chapter examines the territorial politics underlying the city's emblematic zone for free enterprise, the Philadelphia Navy Yard. Conceptualising the Navy Yard as a free zone proceeds through an analysis of the evolution of the district from an industrial space to its current iteration in the knowledge and innovation economy. The chapter highlights how the free zone-styled urban-economic revitalisation strategy enacted in the Navy Yard was made possible through systematic territorial politics that jurisdictionally, infrastructurally and contextually maintained the separation of the zone from the existing city. It concludes by arguing that the extra-jurisdictional shift, in particular the tax breaks offered to corporations in the zone, was the most important factor for firms to locate there.
