Page 199 - 360.revista de Alta Velocidad - Nº 6

Processes, urban impact and evaluation of the high-speed rail in the city of Zaragoza, Spain.

16. Digital Mile

The Major Juan Alberto Belloch and this Office were trying to improve the knowledge society
in the city. This was also one of the mandates of the first strategic plan. During the year 2004,
the City hired McKinsey consulting to this search. After meetings with different agents, the
company concluded that the best location to develop a new district of urban innovation was the
former railway land of the city, the Portillo and Delicias areas. Then they prepared a Director
Plan of Digital Mile to implement an urban district innovation.
The City Council hired MIT School of Architecture and Planning for the development of the
urban project. One of the main ideas was the creation of a Digital Campus with two nodes:
The Center for Art and Technology in Delicias and the Media Library in Portillo. The idea was to
dispose one public facility in each side of the Digital Mile to create synergies.

Fig 26. Concept of Digital Campus and publication by Frenchman and Mitchell from MIT School of Architecture and Planning.
Source: City Council.

Digital Mile was conceived as a digital district, a district of innovation, an urban area focused
in the development of the digital infrastructure knowledge society. According to Fernández-
Ges (2017), a digital district is an area focused in activities related to ICTs and knowledge
economy but it is not a technological park. It is designed as a city: a place to live, to work
and to learn 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The main aim of a digital district is making an
innovative and sustainable city. Some examples of urban projects conceived as digital districts
are Arabianranta in Helsinki; 22@ in Barcelona, or Orestad, in Copenhagen.

Neither ZAV and the City Planning Department embraced the idea of a Digital Mile. ZAV was
more interested in urbanizing and selling plots, and these concepts signified more conditions
to urban design and more difficulties to sell parcels. For the City Planning Department this
concept was more about urban marketing and it was far from their urbanistic ideas. The weak
relationship between the two Offices did not help to include easily these concepts in urban
planning.
The Mayor´s Office finally forced to include these concepts in the G-44-2 regulations, related to
digital infrastructure, home automation and the two digital public facilities. The City Council
built years later the Center for Art and Technology, but with the change of local government in

International Congress on High-speed Rail: Technologies and Long Term Impacts - Ciudad Real (Spain) - 25th anniversary Madrid-Sevilla corridor 197