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In the context of economic crisis, the strong start of the political party “Podemos,” and citizens’ protests derived from the Indignados movement, the “Laboratorios Ciudadanos” in Madrid and the “Ateneus de Fabricació” in Barcelona are reinventing the contours of urban innovation. While relying on digital tools, these new spaces resist the technological determinism of smart cities, which attribute a whole range of positive socio-economic effects to technology (Picon, 2013). Against the logics of concentration and planning of the creative and innovative districts, these areas promote the endogenous, informal, and unexpected nature of their conditions of emergence and functioning. In order to better understand the theoretical and empirical scope of this new generation of cognitive urban system (Besson, 2012), we offer an initial analysis of Barcelona’s “Ateneus de Fabricació” and Madrid’s “Laboratorios Ciudadanos.”. The aim is to gain valuable information from these Spanish experiments about redesigning our urban innovation policy.