The Zaragoza Urban Agenda: An Opportunity to Design the City and Its Surroundings

Zaragoza has a long experience – almost 30 years – in strategic urban planning with a future-oriented and long-term vision for the city. It is characterized by its comprehensive view, consensual and based on alliances. From the beginning it has had a metropolitan character, being one of the first Spanish cities to adopt this methodology and to consider the area of influence as an object of development. To achieve this, the City Council has established a multilevel governance instrument for public-private-social participation and collaboration: The Association for the Strategic Development of Zaragoza and its Surroundings – Ebrópolis. This association is dedicated to the development and promotion of the future strategy of Zaragoza and the surrounding towns with a metropolitan vision and as a city-region. It was founded in 1994 by public institutions such as the Zaragoza City Council, Provincial Council of Zaragoza, Government of Aragon, University of Zaragoza, and major social and economic actors. It currently has over 200 members representing the entire Zaragoza society committed to the future of this territory. All of this converges with urban policies outlined in the Spanish Urban Agenda, the guidelines of the European Agenda, and the New Urban Agenda established at Habitat III, connecting their dimensions and objectives with these urban policies, as well as with the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals. Currently, as part of the strategic framework proposed in the Zaragoza +20 Strategy, the Urban Agenda of Zaragoza and its Local Action Plan are being implemented, framed within the national urban policy, the Spanish Urban Agenda. This is the development of an instrument that allows alignment with national and international urban policies, the creation of exchange and learning communities, the transformation of outdated administrative structures to meet the new requirements of cross-cutting strategic projects, and improved access to European funding. Some fundamental aspects of reflection in these processes include: the primordial role of strategic thinking, urban protagonism in crisis solutions, the need to address the real city while tackling the phenomenon of metropolization, the challenges of urban processes with the need for territorial rebalancing and cohesion, and, therefore, multilevel governance with interinstitutional coordination in planning and service management of such a “network city.” It also involves combining formal institutions with informal mechanisms and overcoming the rural/urban dichotomy.