The dismantling of the old Cepsa Oil Refinery in Santa Cruz de Tenerife has already begun. Supposedly, within a year and a half, the operation will be completed and the municipality of Santa Cruz de Tenerife will have more than half a million square meters for its new (and only) expansion. Because Santa Cruz has a limited territorial growth problem that does not suffer, for example, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. The Cepsa Refinery has been a stopper for the expansion of the capital of Tenerife for a century. Of course, a protocol act was held that was not an initiative of the Santacruce Town Council, but of the Presidency of the Government of the Canary Islands, and there was Ángel Víctor Torres, who invited the Minister Teresa Ribera, and of course his Canarian counterpart, José Antonio Valbuena (in sneakers), and the president of the Tenerife Cabildo, Pedro Martín, and several general directors and similar. What relationship all these countrymen had with the agreement signed by the city council and Cepsa in 2018, then supervised by the regional government, is a mystery if one does not remember that elections will be held within a year. This is how the councilor and former mayor Patricia Hernández understood it, who signed up for the performance to bravely suck on the camera.
The Santa Cruz Verde 2030 project is substantially the article of the 2018 agreement and its success or failure will be the success or failure of the city in the next half century. Santa Cruz de Tenerife is risking its economic growth, the sanitization of its battered urban planning and its collective living conditions. Of the 573,000 square meters of surface, 66% will remain for public use – parks, gardens, equipment and provisions such as a new road – while the remaining area will be of a residential and tertiary nature. In order to create a small city that will improve the whole of Santa Cruz as a public space, it will be essential to reform the Urban Planning Plan, modify urban planning regulations, establish legal forms of collaboration between the city council, council and regional government, streamline hiring and assignments. All this supposes not only a strenuous and systematic work on the part of the affected public administrations –all of them– but also a strict commitment not to partisan a transcendental project such as Santa Cruz Verde 2030, whoever governs in the next eight years. A reasonable period of time, because such a large or complex project cannot go on forever or, simply, will never end. And the capital of Tenerife needs, as it were, a strategic objective that demands jobs, revives social debate, responds to urgent needs and draws a common horizon for development, growth and reinvention of the capital within the conditions of digitization, sustainability, energy saving and clean energy that the European Union reasonably establishes
In the project there is an exhortation to impose processes of urban participation “by actively listening to the neighbors in all phases of action.” Perhaps it is too abstract. But what is clear is that before chanting again about the “capital of the Atlantic” and other villagerisms, it should be understood that the era of projects imposed from political offices is over. All of Santa Cruz must be involved in a project that will define its future. No active listening, like owls that hear the noise of the night in the branches of the trees, but civic conversation and democratic debate with professional associations, specialists, university centers, neighborhood associations, cultural entities. Slowly but surely. No incoherent promises, but no petulance, contempt or careerism.
