When Technopolises Have Lost Their Resilience The Grenoble Paradox

With 670,000 residents and 300,000 jobs, Grenoble is considered a medium sized metropolis by European standards. Enclosed by surrounding mountains and thus poorly connected to the rest of the country, theoretically the city had little attributes to warrant such a unique destiny. Beginning as a small town of 22,000 inhabitants at the dawn of the nineteenth century, Grenoble has experienced outstanding demographic and economic growth over the last two centuries. Up until the start of the twentieth century, this was due to industrialization, and then later to flourishing relationships between science and industry. The city is home to a range of hubs structured around business clusters and specialized research labs (i.e., software, computer chip manufacturing, nanotechnologies, health). The most well-known of these clusters is dedicated to nanotechnologies, and in 2005 it was recognized by the French government as a "global competitiveness cluster". The technopolitan concept crystallized in the territory. And this mindset revealed the dynamic of high value-added businesses and the synergy between scientific industries, and also between these industries and certain segments of society (i.e., administration, businesses, industries, etc.). If we assess the territory's economic situation, we get a real picture of the power of a knowledge economy, the city's impressive vibrancy, the attractiveness of its university, and the innovative capacity of its scientific and industrial spheres. But regardless of all the positive indicators, Grenoble currently seems economically and socially fragile, and many worrying signals are chipping away at the image of the "Grenoble model". More specifically, the 2008 financial and economic crisis hit the territory particularly hard. Results in terms of job destruction are frightening and cause us to take a second look at Grenoble's "hyper-technopolitan" model. Has it become a barrier rather than a lever of change and adaptation to new spatio- economic dynamics? The Grenoble paradox thus raises questions about the role of the knowledge economy in terms of socio-economic resilience. How could a territory with such an innovative capacity have been so impacted by the 2008 crisis that its economy has taken a downturn? Grenoble appears to be a particularly interesting case study to characterize the dissonance between a city's knowledge economy, its growth and development dynamics, and its capacity for resilience and adaptation. The first section of this article takes a theoretical approach to characterize the knowledge economy in order to better understand its impact in territorial systems. In the second section, we will take stock of Grenoble's situation from 2008 to the present day. And finally, in the third conclusive section, we will attempt to determine which paths Grenoble can take to reinvent its model in a way that makes it more resilient.