In the future, you could live in the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin
The St James Gate brewery in the Irish capital will be transformed into an urban district
An interview with the mayor of A Coruña (Spain)
Inés Rey (A Coruña, 1982) is a graduate in Law from the University of A Coruña (UDC). She later studied at the “Decano Iglesias Corral” School of Legal Practice of the A Coruña Bar Association (ICACOR), passing the entrance exam. She began as an intern in 2006 attending the ICACOR in March 2007. Member of the Socialist Youths from the age of 18, she then joined the Socialist Party of Galicia (PSdG-PSOE) in 2002.
Before taking office as a Councilor and being proclaimed the first democratically elected female Mayor in the history of A Coruña, in the Plenary Session held on June 15, 2019 (after the local elections that year), she had dedicated her entire professional life to the practice of law. She is married and has two children.
A Coruña is known as a city where no one is a stranger. It is a phrase that defines very well the Coruñeses (as the locals are known). We are a city open to the world. A city bathed by the Atlantic Ocean and open to the sea. One of our main symbols is the Tower of Hercules, a World Heritage Roman lighthouse that was built 2,000 years ago.
A Coruña is, together with Cádiz, the smallest province capital municipality in Spain, but it has more than 200,000 inhabitants and whose area of influence concentrates more than half a million people. This explains the high density that does not occur in other larger municipalities. This, however, does not have to be a problem with the criteria of sustainability and improvement of urban mobility that we are developing.
We’ve been a 15-minute city even before this concept was generalized: on foot you can reach almost any area of the city very quickly. In this sense, we are working on increasing pedestrian spaces with the aim of building a new 3.5-km pedestrian ring road that connects the city.
In relation to the housing policy, we developed an active rehabilitation policy to recover and modernize the city's stock of buildings. In the last two months, we have approved almost 2.5 million euros in aid for rehabilitation.
A Coruña is a city closely linked to fashion. Inditex (owner of brands like Zara, Bershka and Pull&Bear) was born in A Coruña and has grown in the city and its surroundings to become one of the largest companies in the world. There are many A Coruña men and women who work directly or indirectly for Inditex, in the same way as many other companies that carry the A Coruña banner around the world.
As for the pandemic, all sectors have been affected, but I would like to focus on small businesses, culture, hospitality and leisure. From the City Council of A Coruña we wanted to actively support these sectors from the beginning of the pandemic with our Economic and Social Reactivation Plan (PRESCO), a plan that has been running for two editions and to which we have dedicated 20 million euros of municipal funds to help thousands of freelancers and small businesses and also tens of thousands of local residents through trade incentive plans.
The objective of this recent initiative of our City Council is to strengthen the Coruña fishing sector and bet on the quality of the local product, which has a direct impact on the local economy.
In addition, this seal allows customers to know the origin of the fish that is bought in the markets, fishmongers and other shops and restaurants in the city. Since we presented the initiative in December 2021, almost a hundred professionals from the sector have joined it.
It is a project based on the exchange of knowledge and capacity building that will allow local governments like ours to take advantage of the potential of Nature for sustainable urban development. It is a daunting challenge to be the first European city to take the step of joining this community project and I am sure it will bear fruit.
The commitment to renewable energies, both in A Coruña and in the rest of the cities on the planet, cannot turn back. From this City Council we are fully committed to decarbonization and the 2030 Agenda.
An example of this is the Bens Water Treatment Plant facilities, of which the City Council is the majority shareholder. These have a solar power station that makes it a zero-consumption building. In this same place, we also have a biogas station as an alternative to other fuels, in fact, we are pioneers in the injection of gas generated by treating wastewater in the commercial gas network. Our idea is to move towards greater energy efficiency in the different municipal buildings and encourage citizens to use more and more renewable energy.
As for the Galician coast and its role in this matter, it is a reality that the macro offshore wind farms are there. But in any case, we must be very careful with these types of facilities, since we cannot harm other sectors considered essential, such as fishing, and we must guarantee exquisite care for the environment.
In A Coruña we are experiencing a very important moment of transformation in relation to our maritime façade. The port lands will be permanently open to the public in the near future.
This will allow the creation of large public spaces and the transfer of traffic to the Outer Port of Punta Langosteira. We are fully committed to this port model and it is necessary to seek synergies and share experiences with other cities in similar situations.
Collaboration between City Councils, both in this and in other matters, is essential to advance a model of a sustainable and friendly city for its inhabitants. A Coruña, like other large European cities, must integrate its old docks into the urban fabric, and in this, we have made decisive progress during the current mandate. Today the people of A Coruña can enter areas of the port that until very recently were closed off.
That is the direction and that is how we will continue, seeking to generate new spaces of great urban quality and recovering access to the sea for citizens.
The country may run out of this common frozen product before the end of the summer
Some of these feature entire tanks – objects that have become too unsavoury to honour in light of the current circumstances
An annual ranking shows a wealth of crises threatening local financial stability
Around 8 million euros of state funding will help academic institutions to create a collaborative city-wide digital network
An annual ranking shows a wealth of crises threatening local financial stability
The data will be anonymous and will help the city plan traffic conditions more efficiently
Two lines will run until mid-December in order to find out whether that can solve issues with public transit scarcity in the countryside
The country may run out of this common frozen product before the end of the summer
The bags will help protect young trees’ roots from the urban drought
Two lines will run until mid-December in order to find out whether that can solve issues with public transit scarcity in the countryside
Around 8 million euros of state funding will help academic institutions to create a collaborative city-wide digital network
The towns in the UNESCO-protected national park cannot deal on their own with the trash generated by the throngs of visitors
These will be spread across 11 EU countries and will serve to support the EU Missions
The European Commission has accepted to develop the idea
An interview about AYR, one of the 2021 New European Bauhaus Prize winners
A conversation with the President of the European Committee of the Regions, about energy, climate change and the underrated importance of cohesion policy
Interview with Herald Ruijters, Director, Directorate-General for Mobility and Transport (DG MOVE), European Commission
A conversation with the Mayor of Matosinhos, Portugal’s first UN Resilience Hub