Bilbao has undergone a painful process. This Basque town on the Atlantic was once an important goods trading centre. The harbour installations and heavy industry shaped the townscape and created jobs. However, the industrial crisis in the early eighties dragged the town of Bilbao into the abyss. The population no longer had jobs and the infrastructure was in ruins. The river Nervión, Bilbao’s vital artery, was dead; fish no longer swam in the water, which could change colour from garish green to purple from one day to the next..

Programmed change

The change was ushered in by the Bilbao Rìa 2000 program in 1992. The river was cleaned up and the town redeveloped and given a new infrastructure, as Javier Salazar, Director of Development Planning for “Bilbao Rìa 2000” reported to the “Urban Reports” symposium at ETH Zurich in the end of November 2006. New footpaths were created beside the water and there were new parks and public spaces, a new airport, new bridges such as the Calatravas Zubuzuri, and museums including the world-famous Guggenheim Museum. The expansion of the public transport system cost hundreds of millions of Euros, with the result that Bilbao now has a metro and tramway. But that is still not the end of this lightning-fast development: “We need another seven years,” said Salazar.

Not an isolated case

Bilbao is one of the six examples of European town development that were discussed in the context of the “Urban Reports” symposium.(1)The conference was organised by the ETH Institute for Urban Design. Town planners and architects from Amsterdam, Dublin, Zagreb, Copenhagen and Zurich showed how their respective towns and cities are changing and must change to survive in the globalised world. The conference demonstrated one thing very clearly: the challenge facing urban planning is immense. On the one hand present-day cities must find their place in the global competition, on the other they must overcome economic, ecological and social problems at a local level. Many towns need to cope with the transition from an industrial society to one based on science and the provision of services. In addition to this there are the social and demographic problems caused by a marked

Bilbao has upgraded its townscape with architectural highlights in recent years – the photo shows the Campo Volantin Bridge by the star architect Santiago Calatrava. (photo: www.wikipedia.org) large

individualising and complete drifting apart of various sections of the population. Furthermore, town planning cannot limit itself to a core region of the town, because new relationships extending beyond the town boundaries came into existence long ago, with the result that from time to time it is necessary to cross over even national frontiers or ones that have evolved historically.

Zurich on the right track

Zurich is no exception among the entire group of European capital cities. The transformation from an industrial town to a science and service provider metropolis is taking place here as well. The major industrial districts in Zurich West and Zurich North, the new “HB Urban Space” superstructure at the main rail station, and not least the ETH Science City Project, the upgrading of Schwamendingen: all of them projects intended to strengthen the town and contribute to a special identity, as was demonstrated by Franz Eberhard, Director of the Urban Planning Office of the City of Zurich. For him the milestones in the change of use of existing facilities are the old Löwenbräu brewery, the planned Maag Towers and the new Congress Centre at the lakeside. “Zurich should be a European financial capital as well as a centre of the science economy,” is how Eberhard sketched the vision of his office. The architect Christian Sumi stressed that Zurich does not have a bad hand to keep up in the global game: “Urban quality does not depend on the number of skyscrapers.” He says that the compactness, density and speed of Zurich are one of this town’s advantages. As ever, Zurich’s culture is coloured by a Protestant mentality. Sumi says the inhabitants of Zurich are no phoneys, what you see is what you get. “For Zurich that is the crucial fact.”