The Basque country is full of industrial relics, and hungry for industrial land. What’s going on?
“Buy land, they’re not making it any more”, the American author Mark Twain is supposed to have said. But not all land is the same. Some is mountainous; some is not. Some is watered; some is not. Some is zoned for light industrial use; some is not.
In the Basque country, there is a further complexifying paradox. While there are plenty of abandoned industrial sites – and indeed the Basque tourism authority offers a long list of sites those interested in industrial heritage might visit – there is a dearth of land available which is suitable for industrial use today.
This is the paradox at the core of a fascinating article in Berria, a Basque language daily newspaper, by journalist Jokin Sagarzazu. And it is a potential economic problem, too. If businesses cannot find the land they need – or the permitting process takes too long – they will go elsewhere. Projects used to take four to five years, says Txaber Ouro, the director of Sprilur, a company that builds industrial parks. But that time frame has now doubled, he complains: “we cannot afford to lose these investments; that would be a luxury”.
Mikel Azkona, a professor at the School of Architecture at the University of the Basque Country is a little skeptical of claims that permitting alone is the issue. “We have become experts in the techniques of drilling into mountains to create industrial land”, he tells Berria: “things that would be unthinkable elsewhere have been done here”.
The problem is something else, tied back to the Basque country’s industrial history, making the government’s desire for regeneration and re-use of old unused industrial land inherently tricky. In the past, the industries which flourished were those which were “adapted to their location, adapted to the specific physical conditions of the valleys”, Azkona says.
The sites now required are quite different. Logistics companies want land that is well connected to infrastructure, in large plots (and preferably flat). That can be much harder to find. But perhaps that reflects a lack of imagination. Azkona points to the possibility of logistics hubs moving towards more vertical building, less single-storey horizontal “monsters” as he calls them.
Local politics plays a role too. Ouro argues that local municipalities, under pressure to provide new housing, take too narrow a view of their responsibilities. Housing, nautrally enough, gets priority; but industrial land is essential too. Municipalities, in his view, should work much more closely with companies such as his own.
Azkona has a rather different approach, proposing “hybrid neighbourhoods”, increasing the mixity of small scale industry with residential areas, a concept honed during his time working with the Greater London Authority (GLA) in the United Kingdom.
It’s not a complete solution. Just as with changes in residential neighbourhoods, there can be a kind of industrial “gentrification” when companies that can afford to renovate old industrial buildings push out older, dirtier, but no less essential industries.
In the meantime, two processes of land reclamation continue – decontamination of industrial land from the past, zoning of land for the future. Mark Twain, it turns out, was not an urban planner.
The original article, by Jokin Sagarzazu, ‘Zoru industrialagatik borrokan’, published in Berria and available here.
Berria is the Basque country’s only daily newspaper in the Basque language
