The new Urban Development Paradox: pushing innovation and economic growth, while leaving behind the issue of inequalities.

Within the context of the new Innovation Economy Cities are safer and richer than in the past and possess the ability to attract the human capital, increasing a cutthroat competition among talented people. Moreover, they strengthen highly specialised professional sectors, losing other less specialised segments that have relocated to the suburbs. The direct ripple-down effect is the sharpness of social and spatial inequalities, so that, not only some places are becoming poorer even in rich contexts and some others are becoming richer in developing contexts, but also within the same neighbourhood pockets of inequalities are popping up, creating uneven geographical areas. After acknowledging the market failures and negative externalities, together with the lack of social Safety Net Buffer Tools in managing the new Innovation Economy, the study reviews the main methods generally used for measuring inequalities, namely, descriptive statistics and visualization of data at a macro scale, that risk to lose the micro dynamics, that contemplate continuous changes in the blink of an eye. In order to understand what variables impact spatial inequality at the micro scale, it will be analysed the spatial component and its role in controlling the inequality gap. For supporting the discussion, this contribution will investigate some significant case studies that will allow to extrapolate some hints needed to avoid the sharpness of inequalities. Accordingly, the European approach will be confronted with the American one, evaluating also the existing Public Policies facing inequalities. In the end, it will be attempted to provide an overlapping visualisation methodology defining new criteria and novel boundaries of micro inequalities.