Carlos Perez Marin

Transport infrastructures are essential instruments for the integration of cities in the territory that surrounds them and this integration becomes an essential condition to achieve the economic and social development of its inhabitants. However, there are many obstacles that can arise when developing land planning; isolation due to insularity; the complexity of geographical features (a river or a mountain that prevents or hinders communication); the difficulties that the physical environment entails in desert places; the proximity of borders, even more decisive when there is a great difference between the economies of neighboring countries... Depending on how difficulties are faced and how they are resolved, it will have positive or negative consequences in the future of a city, a territory or even an entire country.

For years, Algeciras and its region, Campo de Gibraltar, have been making a series of demands in terms of infrastructure, with the aim of integrating the port and the bay's industries into the different transport networks of the country and Europe and thus to get out of an isolation that harmed them when competing with other European and African ports. Of all these demands, only one has been partially executed, the Mediterranean highway, but it remains to be extended to Cadiz. Nothing is known about the development of the high speed train (AVE) ​​or the claimed airport (the official plan is to connect Algeciras with Malaga with the AVE, thereby Malaga airport will become the Campo de Gibraltar airport). While our neighbors on the north shore of the Strait are concerned about fully integrating into the European continent, we remain impassive on the south shore, assuming a supposed isolation in which only the port and the heliport maintain a fragile connection with the outside, infrastructures that on the other hand, are not integrated into our urban planning with the consequences that this entails. The land link with Morocco is practically not considered, in fact, in the initial approval of the Revision of the General Urban Development Plan (PGOU) of 2014, the word border or Morocco was not even mentioned (later included in the initial approval of 2016). It is unbelievable the little importance given to our only connection with the African continent in our urban planning.

It is often said that our position in the Strait of Gibraltar is a privilege, but we are not really aware of the opportunities that this offers us, among other things, because we only consider the sea and air routes that leave from Ceuta as a means to reach Europe, the only territory that some people think we "should" relate to, but what about Africa?

For decades Ceuta has wielded the complexity of relations with Morocco to justify the lack of interest in attempting economic development towards the south, beyond atypical trade or smuggling, and what it is worse, the city has not even wanted to consider possible flows of people, thanks to the development of northern Morocco, in urban planning. In short, urban planning in Ceuta has been developed as if we were an island close to the European continent and completely far from Africa.

In contrast to the absence of a territorial and urban strategy in the city, we have a country, on the other side of the border, that has been developing a plan for two decades with the aim of articulating its own territories and inserting these in the African continent, using an infrastructure program as the basis for expansion at different scales (national and continental) and at multiple levels (economic, political, cultural, social ...).

Let us focus on the infrastructures already executed, or future, near Ceuta and that could have an impact, both positive and negative, in our city.

In 2002 works on Tanger-Med port began (just 23 kilometres away from Ceuta), initiating an ambitious program that was not limited to the construction of a port but of 4; 2 container terminals, one for passengers and one military; plus the reconversion of the old port of the city of Tangier (which in turn gave rise to a new fishing port next to the first one).

Everyone knows the importance of the Strait in world container traffic given its geographical position; Algeciras is the Mediterranean port with the highest number of direct container service connections with other ports, with a total of 157, which places it at number 17 in the 2020 world rankings and allows it to reach 107 million tons in merchandise and 5.1 million containers (only surpassed in Spain by Valencia with 5.4). Well, Tanger-Med, after entering service in 2007, has 137 connections with other ports (ranked 26th in the world) and has moved 80 million tons of goods and has surpassed Algeciras and Valencia in number of containers, 5,7 million. This global positioning and the growth possibilities is what led Morocco to make this investment, but that was not the only objective, it also tries to become a reference for traffic with a stopover on the north and west coasts of Africa for thus become the first African port. According to some economists, given the increase in port investments in Africa, only four will be able to become continental port logistics centres and they point to Tanger-Med (Morocco) and Port Said (Egypt) in the north, Djibouti (Djibouti) in the east and Durban (South Africa) in the south. The rest of the ports will have to compete at the regional level and Morocco also wants to be an important player at that level, competing with Mauritania, Senegal, Togo, Ivory Coast and Nigeria in West Africa, for which they are finishing drafting the Dakhla Atlantic new port, which will also serve to generate a land communication axis that will connect Tangier, Casablanca, Dakhla, Nouakchott and Dakar (infrastructures that we will talk about later).

For Morocco it is evident that only from a regional and continental perspective could one think about the need for Tangier to be connected with Dakar and thus be able to develop an important role on a global scale, a mentality that arises from the conviction of the possibilities offered by the location of a city in the Strait.

3.1 Ports and territories

The impact of a port infrastructure can also be important at a regional scale, if we analyse Tanger-Med, it is not just a container interchange, in reality it is a gigantic logistics and industrial platform that would only have made sense as a whole and not as specific investments more or less coordinated, that is, everything built, and what still remains to be done, responds to a strategic plan that has meant great development for the entire country and that 20 years ago would have been unimaginable. Along with the 4 ports mentioned, free zones (industrial and logistics) have been built between Tangier and Tetouan; Tanger-Med Zones, Tanger Free Zone, Tanger Automotive City, Renault Tanger Med, Tetouan Park and Tetouan Shore. Industrial areas in the automotive sector (Renault-Nissam), aeronautics (Daher, Siemens-Gamesa), agri-food, electronics, textiles and services. In order to structure all these facilities, it has been necessary to build highways, roads, railways and even a new city, Charafate (still in progress), with industries, housing, universities and research centres that will provide services to the free zones associated with ports. The idea of ​​Charafate is to create a competitiveness pole in which industries, public and private universities (with their research laboratories) and public institutions are associated, in the image and likeness of the national strategy for industrial and territorial development launched in 2005 by then French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin.

The emergence of these new ports on the Tangerine coast has meant a turnaround in the transport of goods and passengers both in Algeciras and in Ceuta. The first one will have it easier as it is almost the only alternative to passenger traffic (the Tarifa-Tanger Ville and Gibraltar-Tanger Ville connections are not significant due to their volume) but it will have to compete for container traffic, especially in those of transit. However, the one who loses out in this new maritime order is Ceuta, which has seen a considerable decrease in passenger traffic in favor of the Tangerine ports (due among other things by the border blockages). In 2000, the port of Ceuta had a traffic of 2,498,396 passengers and that of Algeciras, 4,270,600, while the latter has continued to grow, that of Ceuta has decreased, thus in 2019, Ceuta had 2,110,304 passengers and Algeciras 6,102,657 according to the statistics of State Ports.

The effects of this economic rebalancing in the provinces of Tangier and Tetouan lead them to rethink already consolidated infrastructures, such as the Ibn Batuta airport in Tangier, for which they are considering two possible locations in the immediate future, one to the south of the current one, between Asilah and Larache, and another near Charafate, so that it can serve both Tangier and Tetouan and thus eliminate the two existing airports, generating in turn new opportunities for urban planning in these two cities. Opportunities that Tangier has taken advantage of very well when it comes to reorganising its old port, once it has been disaffected they have only maintained cruise ships moorings and the one for the ferry that connects them with Tarifa, leaving the rest for pleasure boats (the fishermen have been relocated in a new port west of the current one).

The key to taking advantage of the port reorganisation was in the incorporation of harbour areas into the urban fabric, treating it as a new neighborhood and not as an isolated port of the city, in fact, the authorities began in 2005 a transdisciplinary reflection on urban development that the city needed, without taking into account regulations that could restrict the proposals of the teams, complementing them later with a series of competitions and assignments to architecture studios (some well known such as Zaha Hadid), to study the possibilities of the port. These works were carried out for the candidacy of the Universal Exhibition of 2012 and from the beginning the authorities were clear that regardless of whether Tangier was chosen or not, the aforementioned projects would be the basis of city planning, a fact that has been confirmed since the Universal Exhibition was finally organised by the South Korean city of Yeosu and Tangier has carried out the largest urban transformation in its history.

The incorporation of port land into urban areas was the great revulsion put into practice since the late 1980s by cities such as Vigo, La Coruña, Barcelona, Valencia, Santander, Ferrol and Malaga. If we observe the increase in surface area of some of these cities, thanks to the ports, perhaps we will be less surprised by the implications that a similar strategy would have in Ceuta, as we will see later.

Coordination in the development of these two northern Moroccan provinces could have been even more fruitful if it had opted for the creation, from the beginning, of a metropolitan area, as the Ministry of Spatial Planning, Water and Environment proposed in 2005, taking into account the existence of Ceuta as a generator of flows, regardless of whether there is a border. Given the refusal to bet on this organisation of the territory by the urban agencies of Tangier and Tetouan, some initiatives have been carried out, such as the one we proposed from the National School of Architecture of Tetouan in 2012, calling it Métropole Tingitane or with the Metropolitan Transitions workshop: from project to action in 2018 in which the need to treat the territory jointly arised.

While Morocco has been generating reflections, initiatives, actions and projects at multiple territorial scales for 20 years to take advantage of the synergies of the region (which included Ceuta) and the geostrategic positioning of cities such as Tangier and Tetouan, we have dedicated ourselves solely to develop small urbanisation projects, ignoring both the development of our neighbor, and the structural changes that we really need to be able to get out of the crises, relying on our condition as a Spanish and European city in Africa.

We have seen the importance of providing roads to a new port facility such as Tanger-Med in order to connect it with the rest of the country, but Morocco's investment effort in roads is not limited to the new port, since so far there are 1,839 km of highways in service (it is the North African country with the most kilometers built) and its road network is considered the fourth best on the continent after Namibia, Egypt and Rwanda, according to the World Economic Forum report.

Since the construction of the Fnideq-Tetouan highway was completed, we have been able to take advantage of it, especially during the summer months with the increase in population (and traffic jams) on the coast. Even more beneficial was the section from Tanger-Med to the connection with the Tangier-Rabat highway; in just 30 minutes from Ceuta, we connected with the main communication axis of Morocco, which currently reaches Agadir in the south and up to Oujda in the east. Nowadays, the times to arrive by car to the entrance of the main cities of the country from Ceuta would be; Tangier (1h00 min); Rabat (2h40); Casablanca (3h25); Marrakesh (5h25); Agadir (8h05); Fez (1h45 once built the highway between Fez and Tetouan); Oujda (4h45).

To the highways we have to add the so called express roads, which do not reach the consideration of highways but maintain many of their characteristics (two lanes for each direction, impassable median and maximum speed of 100 km/h). During this year it is expected to reach 2 073 km and with them it is intended to give continuity to the Atlantic axis from Agadir to the border with Mauritania (the state of construction stands at 46%), an axis, which, as we have already seen, is extremely important to strengthen the network of Atlantic ports, connecting Tangier with Casablanca and Dakhla and thus being able to compete at a regional and continental level with Senegal, Ivory Coast and Nigeria.

The two axes, north-south and east-west are not limited to structuring the Moroccan territory, they also aim to connect them with neighboring countries, creating a continental network, sponsored by the Maghreb Union and the UN, a program similar to the major transport infrastructure development projects of the 90s in Europe, which represented a revolution, both economically and in terms of social integration on a continental level.

What consequences would this trans-African network have in Ceuta? Well, to begin with, it would bring us closer to the Algerian cities of Oran (6h) and Algiers (10h15, which is the time it takes to go from Ceuta to Ouarzazate, for example), as long as Morocco and Algeria decide to open their land borders (claim that has stepped up the Moroccan king in recent years). Would it really make sense to think of a flow between Ceuta and Oran, for example? We must consider that to go to the Peninsula from Oran there are maritime connections with Almeria (9h) but above all with Alicante (13h). Taking into account the duration of the crossing and its price, it would be faster and cheaper to go by car to Ceuta or Tangier and cross the Strait, being able to also visit cities such as Fez, Meknes and Tetouan on the way, that is, it would be a suggestive route and it would mean a new flow of passengers and tourists for the city that would have to be taken into account when sizing our internal and external transport infrastructures.

Since the inauguration in 1992 of the first high-speed line (AVE) between Madrid and Seville, we have seen the impact that the AVE has had on the rest of the regions as new lines were put into service (as happened in France years before), not only displacing the plane on some routes, but also revitalising cities located on the periphery of large cities such as Madrid. When the King of Morocco announced in 2011 the construction of the first LGV (High Speed ​​Line) few gave it credibility but in November 2018, the Tangier-Kenitra line became the first of its characteristics on the continent. It is true that there was a lot of controversy due to the high cost of the work, having other more important needs to cover in the country (some said), but that infrastructure, as seen in France and Spain, when its layout corresponds to technical criteria and of exploitation, it cannot be valued only in terms of civil works, since the economic impact can have a macroeconomic scope. In addition, from the beginning, the economic model for operating the line was closer to French than to Spanish, which meant more affordable prices. Thus, while the bus journey between Tangier and Rabat has a cost of 115 Dh (10.85 €) and a duration of 3h35 with the CTM (the main passenger transport company by road), the Al-Boraq train can cost 143 Dh (13.50 €) and it takes 1h20 (once the section between Kenitra and Rabat will be finished it will allow high speeds and it will take 55 minutes). The success has been such that the projects and works of the Plan Rail Maroc 2040 have been accelerated. Currently they are working on the line between Kenitra and Casablanca so that the train can circulate at high speeds (now it is going at conventional ones) and shortly the works between Casablanca and Marrakech will begin. At the same time, the King asked in 2019 to start the drafting of the project connecting Marrakech to Agadir, which should come into operation before 2030 and which would place both cities at 1 hour, instead of the 2h30 it takes by car (the railway infrastructure does not reach Agadir).

As for the east-west axis, the construction of the LGV line between Rabat and Oujda is planned. This axis has a double purpose, to bring the Eastern region closer, historically disconnected from the economic and political centers of the country, and what is more important, to link with the high-speed network of Algeria, Tunisia and Libya.

For years, a commission in which these 4 countries are represented has met annually to evaluate the development of their respective networks, with the aim of coordinating the commissioning of a trans-Maghreb high-speed line that connects Rabat with Algiers, Tunisia and Tripoli. It is clear that Libya has more important issues to solve right now, but it is striking that two neighboring countries, which have kept their land borders closed for more than 27 years, are able to work together on key infrastructures for the development of each country, the North African region and the continent (network to which the already mentioned road network should be added).

In the future (not too distant), the times to reach the main Moroccan cities from the Tanger-Ville station (55 minutes by car from our border) would be: Rabat 1h05 (currently 1h20); Casablanca 1h30 (now 2h10); Marrakesh 2h25 (now 5h14); Agadir 3h15 (there is no railway to Agadir); Fez 2h00 (now 3h15); Oujda 3h05 (currently 10h37). And to reach Algeria: Oran (4h00); Algiers (5h50).

Let's think again whether or not the hypothesis that a tourist from Oran would choose, to reach the Peninsula, instead of a 13 hours sea crossing, a 4 hours train journey (Oran-Tangier) and then another 1 hour by ferry (Tanger Ville-Tarifa). They could also decide to go through Ceuta and discover our city, although the need to travel to the border and cross it would make this hypothesis less likely. For this reason, in 2006, when Tangier began to work on a strategic plan (Tangier 2012) in which high speed trains were already considered, I proposed to the mayor of Ceuta to express our interest, to Madrid and Brussels, in this line arriving, not to the border, but at least to Tanger-Med, as long as there was European funding (finally it was the French government that financed most of the infrastructure). The president's response was the usual one, he did not deserve to carry out those steps because Morocco would never have high-speed trains...

Air transport in Ceuta has improved significantly since the establishment of the Helity company in 2017, in addition to offering flights with Algeciras and Malaga, it has tried to establish new lines, with Melilla and in the future Gibraltar-Malaga and Algeciras-Tangier routes. This dynamism is always good for the city, but they are not the only air transport offers available to Ceuta.

Just 35 km from the border (30 minutes by car), we have the Tetouan airport, which in addition to offering internal flights, has connections (although the majority at certain times of the year) with European airports such as Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lille, Mulhouse, Metz, Malaga, Brussels, Liège, London...

The current Tangier airport is 82 km from the border (1h05 by car) and from there the destinations and the frequency increase considerably; Madrid, Barcelona, ​​Valencia, Seville, Paris, Brussels, Toulouse, Marseille, Montpellier, Nantes, Bordeaux, Lyon, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Cologne, Frankfurt, Milan...

Taking into account that the major European airports are located at a distance from the center of their cities of between 40 and 75 minutes, it could be said that Ceuta is lucky to have a heliport and three airports in its "metropolitan area", because we cannot forget Gibraltar (also 40 minutes from Ceuta if you use the helicopter to Algeciras) which usually has flights to London, Bristol, Manchester, Southampton, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and sometimes event to Madrid. Depending on the offers, it may be more profitable, in time and money, to go to Madrid through Tangier than from Malaga, without the inconvenience of depending on the storms in the Strait, although in recent years, the set of imponderables, we had to add the blockades at the border, so Tangier was no longer an alternative, at least to drive to the airport (another possibility was to cross the border on foot and then take a taxi to the airport).

Having different options to leave the city always affects the quality of life and the possibilities of developing business, both in the city and outside of it, a situation that could improve even more if Morocco finally decides to build the new Tangier-Tetouan airport near Meloussa, to serve the logistics platforms created around Tanger-Med. The new airport could be just 60 km from Ceuta (55 minutes by car) and could be reduced to 45 minutes when the Tetouan-Tangier highway is executed.

But if we go to a continental scale, the situation in Ceuta is considerably reinforced. To be able to travel with non-stop flights from Spain to Africa, regardless of the northern destinations (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt), we only have the Madrid airport, which offers direct flights with Dakar (Senegal), Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) and Malabo (Equatorial Guinea). However, if we look at the direct destinations from Casablanca airport, it turns out that there are 25 (not counting connections with North African countries). Mohamed V airport is 4h10 minutes from the border by car (3 hours once the high speed train arrives to Casablanca), this means that from Ceuta we can directly reach 30 of the 54 countries of our continent. There is no other Spanish city that has these connections. Some may wonder what a citizen from Ceuta could do in most of these countries. In the field of construction, there are many Moroccan architects, builders and investors who, thanks to this facility of moving quickly, are working throughout Africa, especially in developing countries, as are sectors such as finance and telecommunications. In other words, it would not be very difficult for Ceuta to become an European service base in Africa, as long as we are aware of our opportunities and bet on them.

We can still continue to analyse air transport on an intercontinental scale, since the objective of Royal Air Maroc (RAM) is to become the main African airline, taking advantage of the geographical position of Morocco, which allows it to connect Africa with Europe, America and Middle East. In passenger volume, RAM had 7.3 million in 2018 and was surpassed only by Ethiopian Airlines (11.5 million) and Egypt Air (8.7 million). These connections and the data they provide have a direct impact on Ceuta because if we want to go to the US, it is no longer necessary to travel to Madrid (which implies a journey by helicopter and another by train or plane, that is, one more day travelling) because we have direct flights from Casablanca to New York and Boston, as I was able to verify in September 2019. The same would happen if we had business in Qatar (or the United Arab Emirates) because it would be faster and cheaper to travel through Casablanca, as I was also able to verify in 2010.

When it comes to the privileged position of Ceuta, we are not really aware of what it means. Some may refer to the landscape, to the proximity to Europe, to the seas that bathe our coasts... But if we speak from a geostrategic and economic perspective, a privileged position has other nuances, both macro and microeconomic and require analysis and proposals at very different scales. Unfortunately in Ceuta we limit ourselves to a local scale and not even the minimally necessary analyses and proposals are made, which leads us to erroneous decisions and to spend on investments with little profitablity.

One might think that this network of African infrastructures is a simple utopia and that it will never be carried out due to the multiple conflicts that many of its countries suffer, problems that often derive precisely from the precariousness of their communications networks and as a consequence of the isolation of their territories, preventing the development of their economies (as it happens exactly to us). Well, while some leaders distrust this development, others are betting on it, despite the uncertainty of what the neighbor is going to do, which is what happens between Morocco and Algeria. After all, it is as if they were acting within a real "union of Maghreb countries”, but without having consolidated and developed that commercial and political association (as the European countries are doing).

In any case, it should not be forgotten that this terrestrial communications network has been operating, at least, since the sixth century, date until which archaeologists have been able to demonstrate that there was a caravan trade between the northern and southern shores of the Sahara.

To cross the desert in past times it was not necessary a technology as complex as the one that Spain has developed in the high speed train to Mecca (Saudi Arabia), but they had to carry out hydraulic engineering works (which were pioneering in that time) to be able to bring the water up to the intermediate points of the route.

The caravan trade was not limited to transporting goods between the edges of the desert regions, but constituted (as roads and railways do today in Europe) a whole transport network between the Sahel countries and the Maghreb, and of them with Europe, the Middle East and Asia. A transport network whose flows were also affected by regional or continental conflicts, and where the Mediterranean ports had the same functions as the "Saharan ports", giving rest, supplying provisions and enabling different destinations (nowadays direct connections of ports continues to be an important data to climb positions in the maritime transport classifications). If control of strategic places of passage was lost, the routes that passed through it were also lost, generating great losses, hence the need, on the part of the different dynasties, to control the main land and sea routes.

As can be seen in the map (which is the result of an on going research we do in the framework of Project Qafila), our city not only appears in it, but also played a fundamental role in trade on a continental scale from the Almoravid dynasty given its position in the Strait of Gibraltar, allowing goods from Mali (especially from Timbuktu) and Mauritania (from the Adrar region) to reach Europe by crossing the Strait. This network functioned as a system of communicating vessels and when a route was blocked, the merchandise was redistributed and diverted to other points, causing great changes and crises in the affected regions, as evidenced during the 16th century. During a long period the conflicts in the Mediterranean caused by pirates and by the expansion of the Ottoman empire, created such uncertainty that to avoid risks, the merchants decided to change the Mediterranean ports for the Atlantic ones to deliver goods, using mostly ports under Portuguese control, thanks to the expansion started in Ceuta in 1415 and which allowed them to establish a maritime route (military and commercial) to Macao in China, obtaining great economic and military power.

In short, the development and control of communication infrastructures at different scales (regional and continental) has allowed the different dynasties and empires to exercise power throughout history, this fact is still evident today as we have seen with the different infrastructures that Morocco is executing, under the same objective, to become an African power and become a reference for developing African countries, taking advantage of the growth forecasts that place our continent as the area where the economy is going to have higher growth (as long as the necessary reforms are undertaken) and placing the sub-Saharan region as the most dynamic in growth rate in 2030 due to the increase in its population.

It is possible that everything explained so far produces indifference in the citizens of Ceuta, where an important part of the population continues to see Morocco only as a place of tourism or where to take advantage of the opportunities that exist on any border with disparity of economic levels (for example cheaper labor or food products). This limitation in the understanding and the implications that the development of our environment has prevents us from seeing the multiple opportunities that all these infrastructures offer us (at zero cost for our budgets) to become a true platform for European services in Africa. This ignorance or lack of interest leads us to deal with local problems as long as they can be solved in a short space of time (the one that goes from one election to another), leaving aside medium or long-term investments that should really be a priority for our future and that local and state administrations would have to undertake in a coordinated and consensual manner.

If we want both Morocco and Africa to become an opportunity for the development of our city in aspects such as the economy, security, education, culture or scientific research, we need to radically change our vision of two key infrastructures that if they are not completely reformed, we will doom the city to agony or perennial subsidy.

8.1 port and marine spaces

A port strategy should not focus on competing with Algeciras and Tangier, given our small size, but on complementing them by offering services that can differentiate us, considering our possibilities on a regional (the Strait of Gibraltar) or global scale. A similar attitude was taken by Malaga when it began to work on a strategic plan as an instrument to develop a city that had lagged behind Andalusia, works during which they realised they could not compete in tourism with Seville or Granada by not having such a rich, extensive and unique heritage, so they had to bet, among multiple measures, on culture, a risky decision that has become a catalyst for many economic sectors, giving rise to a kind of renaissance of the city from different points of vue (urban planning, real estate, tourism, business, culture...).

Regardless of the services that our port may provide in the future (for which it will be necessary to have a group of experts in port and geographical resources), it will be inevitable to reflect at different levels, because it is not just a matter of thinking about how the port infrastructures are expanded, their relationship with the city, with the Strait of Gibraltar, with the Mediterranean and with the African continent will have to be taken into account.

As for the city, a complete change of mentality will be necessary when thinking about our urban planning. We cannot continue to think a territory defined exclusively by the current land-maritime limits, we have to consider the maritime space that surrounds us as susceptible to becoming land space. The delimitation of territorial waters, the levels of the bathymetric (both in the south bay and in the north) and environmental conditions, especially Patella ferruginea (an endemic species in danger of extinction), will be the main determining factors when thinking about our future urban limits.

Perhaps it would be more convenient to use another terminology since certain maritime spaces must be integrated into the urban fabric due to the existence of the navigable moat and the protection of the Patella ferruginea, a species that colonises breakwaters and that could be dismantled to move them, with the same conditions, to other places, but it will be necessary to study which ones are worth relocating and which ones will have to be conserved, this means that we will not have land reclaimed from the sea by simply moving the coastline out to sea, as an engineer would instinctively do, but we will have to leave maritime zones within this new maritime terrestrial boundary.

On the other hand, the possible extension of the port will increase the disproportion between urban land and port land, running the risk of becoming a port with a city (which we could call dormitory one) instead of a city with a port. The easiest thing would be to disaffect the land closest to the urban fabric, as was done with the lower part of the Marina and with the splitting of the Paseo de la Palmeras, and continue to maintain the independence of the port area from an urban point of view. However, if a new port infrastructure is built, or the current one is expanded, it will have to be planned at the same time as the city, for which we will have to provide ourselves with legal instruments since the current ones would not allow it.

For years the city has been entrusted with the highest-ranking planning instrument provided by the consolidated text of the Land Law of 1976, the General Urban Planning Plan (PGOU), which was perhaps ideal in the 80s and 90s of the past century, but today it is insufficient to provide answers to the challenges facing the city. Regardless of the disastrous management carried out by the local administration, unable to review a PGOU in used since 1992 and that should have been revised in 2000, the truth is that the approval of the new document in the coming months (or years), it will only serve to clean up all the specific modifications made in the last 29 years and to update certain parameters, but it will not provide solutions to current or future problems. Faced with this situation, the number one priority of our authorities must be to claim a Comprehensive Planning of the Territory Law for Ceuta, which we are trying to promote from the Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de Ceuta, and that it would resolve the legal vacuum caused by the repeal of the revised text of the Land and Urban Rehabilitation Law of 2015, due to the violation of autonomous powers after each region had developed its own land laws, with the exception of Ceuta and Melilla, that they have no legislative capacity. A specific law for Ceuta would provide us with legal instruments to undertake and manage the in-depth reform of urban planning and thus be able to adapt to the changes that occur both in the city itself and in our environment (including new laws, such as climate change and energy transition). One of the important articles would be the creation of a planning figure superior to the PGOU and that could be based on the Territorial Coordination Master Plans, which are already included in our current state regulations, but which are proposed to coordinate actions between two municipalities, not within the same municipal area. The Territorial Master Plan of Ceuta would allow us to treat in a unified way our land, port and maritime space, which would open up the possibility of planning how we reclaim land from the sea and incorporate uses that current legislation does not allow, as long as it is carry out modifications in other laws that would not include such specificity for the city, such as Law 2/2013, of May 29, on the protection and sustainable use of the coast and the modification of Law 22/1988, of July 28, of Coasts, the only references to land reclaimed from the sea appear in articles 4 and 9:

article 4:
The following also belong to the state maritime-terrestrial public domain:

2. Land reclaimed from the sea as a direct or indirect consequence of works, and those dried up on its shore.

article 9

1. There may not be land owned other than that of the State in any of the properties of the maritime-terrestrial public domain, not even in the case of land reclaimed from the sea or dried up on its shore, without prejudice to the provisions of Article 49.

These articles were designed to prevent speculation through urban projects in coastal cities that used the private construction of marinas as an excuse to develop tourist accommodations or dwellings on land reclaimed from the sea. In our case, it is not about expanding the existing port or building a marina in the south bay, it is directly about building a city on the sea to alleviate the deficits of land and green spaces in general, and to solve structural problems of many neighborhoods in the city (for which public-private financing will be necessary), but with the current law this type of approach would not be possible.

8.2 border

If you wanted to implement a strategy to take advantage of the infrastructures of the neighboring country so that companies and the self-employed can expand or develop their businesses on the African continent, the sine qua non condition to be able to carry it out would be the proper functioning of border.

In recent years we have seen how we have gone from having car retentions only some days of the week and at certain times, to having blockages every day. In the first case, trips could be adapted to schedules with fewer problems, making the border more like the passage of a toll station on a highway. With a fluid border, keeping a job at the Moroccan university, in a company or doing business was not a problem, as were family, friends or cultural relationships. However, when the blockages started to be spontaneous, at any time and on any day of the week, then the uncertainty became an insurmountable barrier, causing an isolation that was difficult to perceive but that was present. This was the situation before March 2020.

We are not going to analyse the causes of border problems, because they are very complex, but we can affirm that they were not caused exclusively by smugglers (on foot or by cars) or by the Moroccan police; We should also add the insufficiency of personnel on the Spanish side (National Police and Civil Guard) at certain times of the day and perhaps the most important, and in which we are going to stop, the lack of physical space.

While the other variables do not depend on the decisions of the Ceuta authorities, the expansion of the facilities could, if the City had attributions to act "urbanistically" outside the maritime land limits, for what it is necessary to have an specific Comprehensive Planning of the Territory Law. If we want our border to have the capacity to handle a significant volume of vehicles and people with relative fluidity, it will have to multiply its surface considerably and not only for the facilities themselves, especially to channel and properly organise the flows and complementary uses related to the border. An expansion that is complex if we stick to the current terrain, conditioned by the maritime-terrestrial limits and by the orography.

As with the port, we can obtain land reclaimed from the sea simply by moving the coastline till we have the necessary surface or we can do it in a smart way, creating three new coastlines instead of one. This separate expansion of the coast would allow providing services to both the border and the nearby neighborhoods (Príncipe Felipe, Príncipe Alfonso, Almadraba-Tarajal, Miramar Bajo, Miramar Alto, Juan XXIII and Loma Colmenar), solving their structural deficiencies that are almost impossible to achieve due the current building densities. If we want this urban operation to be profitable and functional in the long term, it could not be reduced to a minimal expansion, but should perhaps become a new neighborhood.

We have mentioned flows as a determining factor when it comes to quantifying the necessary areas to improve the border, its accesses and the nearby neighborhoods, but we will be wrong if we only quantify the population of Ceuta that may be interested in leaving through it, this is where we have to analyse the possible impact that new Moroccan infrastructures could have on our city, and which are not limited to Moroccan tourists or workers who live in the contiguous province of Tetouan, but to the Maghreb, that is, to our continental region. If we remember the road and rail networks that will connect Morocco and Algeria (once the land borders are reopened), we are talking about having the second city of Algeria, with a population in its metropolitan area close to two million people, only 4 hours from Tangier by high-speed train and 7 hours by car. Depending on the time it will take them to cross the border and the facilities they have to board and make the crossing, they will decide to do it through Ceuta or Tanger-Med (which we remember are separated 25 minutes by car). You might think that this hypothesis is a utopia, but the same was said of Tanger-Med and the high speed train ​​in Morocco. Nor should we forget the Moroccans from the administrative and economic capitals who, until not long ago came, to Ceuta just one day to buy during the sales and who stopped doing so because it took longer to cross the border than to reach it from Rabat (3h) and Casablanca (4h).

It will be necessary to carry out a socioeconomic study to see what could be the flow of Moroccans and Algerians who could pass through the border once all the aforementioned infrastructures have been put into operation, but it would not be unreasonable to think of a greater traffic than that originated in recent years by smuggling (on foot and by car), and that caused the collapse of the border and our economy. In other words, despite the suppression of atypical trade, the border will continue to be insufficient in its current configuration.

8.3 port-city-border

Taking into account the fundamental needs of Ceuta, regarding the port and the border, as well as the orographic difficulties (land and sea) and the singularities of the physical environment, a future extension of the city could be considered in these terms.

However, the City should call an architecture competition (not an urban planning one) in which it will consider what Ceuta would be like in the year 2070, subsequently using the chosen idea(s) to establish a planning strategy for the city (as was done in the 1930s) and land legislation in accordance with the proposed solutions, a request that we also included in the document EL COACE ANTE LA(s) CRISIS.

Everything that has been said so far is linked to a "normal" operation of the border, which has not happened in 2020 or 2021 because of the pandemic, nor in previous years with the intermittent blockades caused by smuggling. As if that were not enough, in Ceuta we constantly suffer the consequences derived from the lack of trust and understanding between Rabat and Madrid, which sometimes translates into incidents in both the Tarajal and Benzu borders. From our city we should make an effort to explain to the central government the importance that this land connection with Africa can have for the interests of Ceuta and Spain, requiring an investment in accordance with its function, the gateway to Africa for Spanish entrepreneurs and not just a simple border crossing for Ceuta inhabitants.

However, what happened if Morocco continues to keep the border closed after the removal of the health alarm states or opens it intermittently as an instrument to pressure future negotiations? Unfortunately, this option is a real possibility since the pandemic has shown that a closed border does not mean the end of the world, neither for the Moroccan authorities, who feared the reaction of cross-border workers and smugglers, nor for many people in Ceuta whose only link to the Morocco was precisely those workers, nor for another large group who blamed all the local problems on the neighbour and who would prefer that the border remain closed.

Face the uncertainty situation and given the high probability that we will be cut off by land, what development strategies should we implement?

In extreme situations, like the one we now live in, we cannot adopt a victimising attitude and ask Madrid to get us out of this situation while we dedicate ourselves to lamenting and doing nothing. What we should do is look for solutions using our own means, only then we will be able to develop our city. For this purpose, it would be very useful to carry out a theoretical exercise, I insist that this is not a demand, it is simply to establish a hypothesis that forces us to think about how to take advantage of our resources, which are scarce but exist.

Let's imagine that Ceuta were an island located in the Atlantic Ocean, halfway between Europe and America, that is, we would not have a proximity to a continent that would ensure “provisioning” for us in every way. Let's set another level of difficulty; Let’s consider that Ceuta is an autonomous territory and that it is not associated with any country, therefore, we are not going to receive aid to be able to serve a population of 84,000 people from either Spain or the European Union. In such circumstances, would a society like the present one be viable?

It will not be in this brief text that strategies for this hypothesis are proposed, but it would be appropriate to show an example with one of the essential sectors for the functioning and even existence of a city; the energetic. Since the diesel power plant came into operation in 1980, we have been told that we had no other alternative and that we therefore had to be content with a highly polluting and extremely expensive energetic system. With the policy implemented by the European Union to curb climate change, betting on renewable energies, the only alternative proposed by the local and central government has been the submarine cable, which should really be a complementary source, but not the only one, since there are other options that would not force us to continue being dependent on the Peninsula. In this same publication there is another article, Ceuta and Energy Self-sufficiency, in which the hypothesis has been raised whether we could generate all the energy we need through renewables to be able to achieve the decarbonisation of Ceuta in 2040. The result is affirmative and shows, in my opinion, the attitude we should have to also achieve self-sufficiency in legislative, jurisdictional, economic, educational, social, cultural aspects... To think for ourselves as if no one was going to help us, because once the solutions are found, and planned, it will be much easier to claim them from the central government and even from the European Union, as long as there are no prejudices and fears of atypical, a priori, approaches.

Our future must go through taking advantage of our integration into Africa despite all the difficulties of having Morocco as a neighbor (which also claims its soberanity and will not stop doing so). This will force us to deploy a complex and intelligent diplomatic strategy at the national level, but also another, in parallel, at the cross-border level; in cultural, social, educational, business... In this second case, we, the people from Ceuta, are the ones who will have the “obligation” to deploy and establish a whole network of contacts more personal and away from political and diplomatic ups and downs, which in a way, some of us have been developing over the years, showing their viability and usefulness. For that, we will have to adapt our educational, training and business plans in such a way that we are capable of instilling, or rather recovering, an entrepreneurial attitude that is not limited exclusively to Europe, but also to Africa.

Nevertheless, this cross-border and trans-African strategy will not be possible if we do not have a fluid border crossing, capable of absorbing the flows that are going to occur in the long term, even with the risk of creating an oversized infrastructure during the first years. The port must be rigorously planned and always taking into account strategic criteria that allow us to position ourselves internationally, but as an integral part of the city, not as an independent space.

If we do not take urgent and radical measures, we will have to resign ourselves to a situation of isolation (like the current one) and this will mean a great failure as a Spanish, European and African society, and contrary to the identity that the inhabitants of this territory have always had throughout history. Isolation is not a possibility, although a sector of the population prefers it, because as long as we continue to refuse our Africanity, the rest of the African nations will continue to see us as an anomaly.

Ceuta, May the 18th 2o21

graphics and texts © Carlos Pérez Marín

published in Transfretana nº8 edited by Instituto de Estudios Ceutíes in September 2021