Irun is the border town between the Spanish and French Basque Country. Irun is an important rail hub, where the French rail network connects to the Spanish network with wider tracks. The Railway Site is very dominant in the city centre. As a result of an optimisation, 34 hectares of

will be freed up for a new purpose. With this project, the city council wants to give Irun a new face together with the citizens and all stakeholders. The board opted for a master plan approach to frame the project with the right governance. This participation project is part of the exploratory phase, to establish the goals and design criteria for the new master plan, with the starting point being to reduce the impact of the rail infrastructure, to completely renovate the station, to revise the railway route and to provide a mixed interpretation with a service centre, economic activity and housing. During the participation, we focus on informing, testing and building consensus. We inform about the project, the process and the importance of participation, we test different lines of thought from various angles and build consensus with visualisations of objectives.

740 People contributed during the surveys, 350 participated in the physical workshops and more than 4,000 visited the information exhibitions. This productive exchange resulted in a stable consensus on the objectives, which served as the foundation for developing the future master plan. These objectives were then distributed to 23,000 households through a newsletter.