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Basque Studies Program Newsletter
· Issue 57,
1998
Postindustrial Bilbao: The
Reinvention
of a New City
by Joseba Zulaika
First it was the “medieval Villa” (founded
in the year 1300 by Don Diego López de Haro); then it
was the “commercial Villa” (after the
establishment of its Consulate in 1511); then, since the
second half of the last century, it was the proud regional
“industrial city” we all know. But a new
millennium is dawning. And now in the 1990s a new
“postindustrial Bilbao” is being reborn from the
ashes of its industrial ruins.
A massive infrastructural transformation and urban
regeneration process is under way to turn Bilbao into a
service-oriented and culturally attractive city. The
flagship of the entire redevelopment, Frank Gehry’s
spectacular Guggenheim-Bilbao Museoa, has made international
news lately. But the goal is to effect the postindustrial
reinvention of the city. As it undergoes the painful yet
exhilarating metamorphosis from industrial ruination to
architectural rebirth, Bilbao presents singular
opportunities for tourism-based industries, as well as
unique challenges for students of Basque society and
culture.
The Nervión River
You are, Nervión, the history of the
Villa,
you her past and her future, you are
memory always turning into hope
and on your firm riverbed
a fleeing flow.
Thus wrote Miguel de Unamuno of his
“bochito” - his beloved Bilbao nursed by her
River. The foundational charter granted the medieval Villa
exclusive jurisdictional rights to the Nervión’s
trade. Bilbao was the natural port for the export of
Castillian wool to Flanders and her wide window on the
world. Ever since, the Nervión has been Bilbao’s
history, wealth, and metaphor.
Bilbao was doubly blessed with a seaport and vast
mineral wealth. Never was this as clear as during the last
150 years of industrial boom, during which the river’s
Left Bank held Spain’s largest iron and steel
industries. After the discovery of Henry Bessemer’s
converter in 1856, which allowed cheap production of steel
in vast quantities, Bilbao’s output of iron ore went
from 55,000 tons in 1861 to 2,684,000 tons in 1880, and it
jumped again to 6,496,000 in 1898. To have a sense of
Bizkaia’s crucial role in the global capitalist system
of the late nineteenth century, Great Britain, the
world’s imperial power, imported two-thirds of her iron
ore from Bilbao (or 65-75% of Bilbao’s annual
exports).
But foreign companies came to Bilbao not only as
buyers of ore, but also as backers and participants in the
exploitation of the mines. Through investment in the iron
and steel industries, railroads, and the harbor,
international capital was crucial to the region’s
industrialization. In fact, the two most important foreign
companies, the Orconera Iron Ore Co. and the
Société Franco-Belge des Mines de Somorrostro,
were multinationals. Foreign companies extracted 40% of
Bizkaia’s iron during the 1880-1900 period. All in all,
there existed a good symbiotic relationship between foreign
and Basque capital. Historians estimate that between 60 and
75% of all the gains remained in the pockets of
Bilbao’s industrial elite. By 1929, although Basques
constituted a mere 3% of Spain’s population, Basque
capital represented 25% of Spanish banking resources, 38% of
the investment in shipyards, 40% of the stock in engineering
and electrical construction firms, 68% of the funds
dedicated to shipping companies, and 62% of the monies
invested in steel factories.
A wasteland of industrial ruins is almost all that is
left now of that fabled industrial period. But the ongoing
massive redevelopment is testimony that the dark and
generous River is still very much alive. As Bilbao emerges
from the mantle of debris accumulated during the last tide
of history, the city of 360,000 people has never been as
remote from and yet as close to that small town of 18,000
souls that she was only 150 years ago. Already 75,000 people
have abandoned the city during the last two decades of
decline. But Bilbao is far from having given up her
tradition of international business. Her capacity for
high-stakes risk-taking remains undiminished. And don’t
forget her metaphor - the one that made Bertolt Brecht write
“How beautiful, how beautiful, how beautiful is the
moon of Bilbao, the most beautiful city of the
continent.” Hers is also the aesthetics of the
“tough city” that have seduced artists such as
Richard Serra and Frank Gehry. This seduction is perhaps
Bilbao’s greatest asset at this moment; it is the true
arena in which, by architectural spectacle and the sheer
will to challenge all odds, she is transforming herself in
ways almost unimaginable a few years
ago.
Just look at what is happening in Abando-ibarra,
right across from the University of Deusto: a grand
titanium-skinned white whale has run aground there. Or is it
a pirate’s old galleon suddenly resurfaced? It is
Gehry’s masterpiece. It is the now undisputed emblem of
a reinvigorated city unwilling to fade away with the demise
of its blast furnaces - the Altos Hornos de Vizcaya,
industrial engine and fiery symbol of the region’s
economy until just yesterday. The volcano of the Left Bank
is now mostly extinguished, but the sunset’s yellow
colors are captured and reflected on the platinum scales of
Gehry’s pale cetacean. “A miracle!”
proclaimed The New York Times in contemplation of the
radiant building. The real miracle, of course, is the
resolve of the Bilbainos not to tolerate the extinction of
their city’s proverbial fire and
flourish.
Ashen debris, white smoke, black water, red
slag…a generous supply of dirt of all colors and
elements was Bilbao’s emblem. Her distinctive aesthetic
force consisted of turning ugliness into a badge of honor, a
thing of beauty for those willing to contemplate with eyes
uncontaminated by pastoral nostalgia. But now the smoking
chimneys are gone, even dirt is in short supply, and the
tourists have started to come. The decades of heavy
industrial exploitation had turned the Nervión into a
black meandering sewer upon which the Bilbainos had long
since learned to turn their backs. No longer do they need to
avert their eyes from the prodigious River, the very soul of
their history and identity. On the contrary, Bilbao is going
to transform its riverfront into the real center of the new
city. This is as great a historical transformation as one
could expect from Bilbao’s fin-de-millenium. It signals
the city’s willingness to unburden herself from all the
sins of the industrial revolution and the ensuing
environmental degradation. The hegemony of mining and iron
industries is dismantled, the sky is free from the drifting
clouds pumped into it by the now sorely-missed smoking
chimneys, and it is no longer taboo to look at the
River.
From Industrial Ruins to Architectural
Emblems
History is a process of decay and ruin - this is the
quintessential perspective that emerges from Bilbao’s
fin-de-millenium. Were it not for the spectacular ruins of
its metropolitan area of about a million people, Bilbao
would be a typical European provincial city that exudes a
bourgeois lifestyle. But it is the aesthetics of the
“tough city” that sets Bilbao
apart.
For months I have walked among the industrial and
urban wasteland of Bilbao’s Left Bank - kilometers of
silent ruins, hundreds of buildings awaiting demolition,
urban neighborhoods with deserted streets and industrial
sites with smokeless chimneys, entire valleys devastated by
pollution, river banks contaminated beyond redemption,
residential zones and garden plots adjacent to the most
degraded areas. By 1995 Altos Hornos de Vizcaya - the smoky
“tall ovens” of fire that gave a living to tens of
thousands of families, the blast furnaces that were the
proud emblem of the Left Bank’s entire industrial
complex - had shut down. In the municipal area of Bilbao
alone there are 52 industrial ruins that comprise 48
hectares of land; the next town on the Left Bank, Baracaldo,
has another 25 industrial ruins occupying 100 hectares.
Sestao is the next municipality of larger metropolitan
Bilbao, and one third of its entire area is occupied by
ruins. And so on. Bilbao’s book stores feature
prominent photo reports chronicling the destruction of the
city’s old factory buildings and chimneys, the enormous
steel structures of complex architecture soaring within an
apocalyptic landscape like huge, rusty phantoms bespeaking
desertion, silence, and drama.
But ruins beckon to new architecture, new beginnings,
new millennia. And Bilbao is ready to produce them in
abundance. Yes, in the beginning there were ruins but now
there is, or soon will be, Bilbao-2000.
By the end of the 1980s Basque officials were
beginning to accept the unthinkable: the word
“decline” referring to their major city. Bilbao is
the political base of the Basque Nationalist Party, the
region’s political force since Franco. An economically
and demographically imploding Bilbao sounded several alarms.
If the city could be credited with having industrialized the
Basque region, it was now time for the country to repay it,
to assist in its moment of crisis. To begin with, Bilbao and
its metropolitan industrial area is home to a million
Basques. For historical, sociological and financial reasons,
it is impossible to reform the Basque economy without first
revitalizing its engine, Bilbao.
Enter now the architect as savior. Gehry, Foster,
Pelli, Sterling, Wildford, Pei, Soriano, Palacio and
Calatrava - by now household names in Bilbao. They were
preceded by the discourse on “urban regeneration,”
which received public attention when Mayor José
María Gorordo organized (in 1989) Bilbao’s first
international congress entitled “Forum Bilbao for Urban
Regeneration.” Throughout the 1980s there had been a
huge effort to build a new infrastructure, highways and
bridges in particular. But a new beginning was needed - a
new image, a new postindustrial economic base, in short, an
entire reinvention of an ancient, declining
city.
The demise of former industries on the Left
Bank’s riverfront had left large parcels in a state of
ruin. They were close to the center and well-suited for
major redevelopment projects. An ambitious $1.5 billion
urban renewal plan was soon in place. It focused
upon:
1. Expansion and modernization of the port, the
central artery of Bilbao’s commercial life;
2. Creation of new transportation facilities that included a
subway (designed by Norman Foster; its first phase completed
in 1996), expansion of the airport (by Santiago Calatrava),
and a central transport hub or “Intermodal” for
buses and trains (designed by James Stirling, now espoused
by Michael Wilford; it has been postponed indefinitely);
3. A new development on the riverfront. This included a
one-million-square-foot office and shopping mall complex in
Abandoibarra (by Cesar Pelli), a conference and concert hall
(by Federico Soriano and Dolores Palacio), and a museum of
modern and contemporary art, the Guggenheim-Bilbao (designed
by Frank Gehry).
Of all these major projects two are emblematic of the
new Bilbao: Foster’s sleek, costly subway which,
besides its practical advantages, symbolized the city’s
new infrastructure and regained sense of proud modernity,
and Gehry’s voluptuous and optimistic Guggenheim
Museum. The museum has overshadowed all other projects by
drawing to Bilbao the international attention that it so
desperately desires.
Spanning the Globe
A bridge first spanned the Nervión long before the
Villa was founded in 1300. That bridge of San Antón
was the first Promethean attempt to arch worlds apart: land
and shore, river and sea, interior and exterior, past and
future, left and right. It is only through a tradition of
spanning the seemingly impossible - with suspension bridges
floating in the air and drawbridges opening up their
mandibles to the sky in a big yawn as the surreptitious
cargo files by, structures that were always tenuous and
temporary rites of passage, always complicated works of
arrogant engineering - that Bilbao has sustained the fiction
of a synthesis of warring elements - a historical linkage
between the seemingly irreconcilable worlds of the Villa and
its hinterland, of the rural and urban economies, of
aristocratic and proletarian lives, of Basque and European
interests.
After Deusto there were no bridges: fifteen
kilometers of right and left riverbanks from the city to the
sea uncompromised by any link with the single exception of
the suspension bridge in Portugalete. But times are
changing, and the River has been criss-crossed by several
new bridges (Rontegi, Euskalduna, Zubizuri). Others are in
the planning stage. The secret, as everyone knows, is that
the one bridge that will really matter must connect Bilbao
with entities that are at once far more virtual (so-called
global culture) and far more concrete (Wall Street) than
anything achieved so far. The lehendakari’s visit to
Wall Street to deliver a $20 million check for the
Guggenheim Museum franchise is a statement that leaves few
doubts in this regard. Bridging the interior’s tierra
llana with the port-centered, open Villa was not a small
feat (although this, too, dressed up in nativism and
provincialism, still continues to be a source of friction).
Now, however, the only measure of success is the bridging of
transatlantic distances, New York at one end and Bilbao at
the other, facilitating traffic in modern art, museum
franchises, and monies for the Basque cultural patrimony.
The Romanesque arches of the San Antón bridge,
medieval symbol of a proud Bilbao, are now complemented by
the postindustrial city establishing herself as the key port
and fundamental artistic point de repère (landmark)
of the so-called “Atlantic Arch” stretching
between Santiago de Compostela and Bordeaux. Welcome to the
newly imagined global postmodern space of late
capitalism.
But there is a lot of bridging to be done at home as
well between the two riverbanks, the two languages, and the
two millennia. Issues of violence, nationality, class,
gender, and language continue to polarize Bilbao society
endemically. She appears perched uneasily between a
mythology of the past, which successfully deployed an
ethnographic identity of premodern Basque enigmatic
uniqueness, and a mythology of the future, which looks to
global markets and the delirious glamour of New York for the
inspiration of a new post-ethnic
identity.
The discourse of urban regeneration works
particularly well in fostering a sense of new direction. It
embraces economic as well as environmental, cultural, social
and symbolic components. Leisure activities and so-called
“cultural industries” become most relevant in a
regenerating urban center. The distinctions among
“art,” “communication,”
“culture” and “entertainment” disappear.
Urban regeneration by leisure and cultural industries has
been attempted with uneven results in various European and
American cities. Not only yuppie tourists, the discourse
reassures, but also Bilbao’s unemployed, its youth, and
its migrant and marginal people will benefit from such
cultural industries. The argument is that emblematic
architecture is the condition for the economic renewal that
will bring back jobs and prestige to the
city.
In the beginning was architecture - arché,
foundation, architecture. In classical aesthetic theory,
architecture is the first art. Salvation by architecture is
the cornerstone of the new regenerationist ideology in
Bilbao. Due to its dependence on public funds, architecture
tends to be used ideologically more than other arts. Bilbao
provides perhaps the grandest example of architecture as
ideology and spectacle. The ideological use of architecture
consists of the uncontested assumption that public power
must invest massively in emblematic buildings conceived by
star architects, “emblems,” that is, of ideas of
progress, culture, class equality,
peace.
Bilbao’s ruins authorize discourses of brand new
beginnings. Let us build a new city and believe a new
mythology. The staggering ruins of the Nervión’s
left bank legitimize the presence of architecture’s
entire star system in Bilbao. The danger seen by some
critics is the imposition of a dazzling architecture that
becomes the new authoritarian master. Fallen into the
narcissistic trap of citizens turned into voyeurs of their
politicians’ grandiose projects, truly cultural
objectives or even economic needs may prove secondary to the
architectonic vision of the millennial
beginning.
This is the time to visit Bilbao. Gehry’s
masterpiece is an architectural triumph among the
postindustrial ruins of the Nervión. If architecture
provides cause for celebration, this is it. It has been
likened to a whale, a ship, an artichoke, a mermaid, a
waterfall, a flower, a fish, Marilyn Monroe, a chopped-up
Chinese paper dragon. It has been hailed by the critics as
the building of the late twentieth
century.
This is also the time for Basque scholars to realize
the potential rewards of turning Bilbao into a privileged
topic of research and writing. Ruination and rebirth, the
end of times and the beginning of time, historical processes
deserving urban and cultural studies. The ruined
post-industrial city turned into the postmodern model of an
architecturally imprinted city. Urban planning and
regeneration, architecture, museum culture, globalization,
postindustrialism, migration, international art markets,
cultural industries, anthropology, and history are some of
the obvious discourses deserving attention. For those
interested in experiencing the poetics of ruins (“You
are, Nervión…memory always turning into
hope”) and studying the politics of building (“and
on your firm riverbed / a fleeing flow”), Bilbao,
“how beautiful” is her unique
appearance.
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