Volume 60 (2002): Edizione 5-6 (September 2002)

The Ad Hoc Working Party on “Structure of the DB German Rail Network from a Spatial-Planning Perspective“, set up by the ARL (the German Academy for Spatial Research and Planning), has framed a proposal for a national rail network which is based on the existing national rail network of the Deutsche Bahn AG and pays particular attention to criteria of relevance to comprehensive spatial planning at national level. The goal of sustainable spatial development, the hierarchy of central-place locations and the guiding vision of polycentric concentration were the key criteria behind the adoption of rail links into the network proposed. Consequently, this network raster reflects the current distribution of population and of economic activity, whilst at the same time taking into account conceivable developments in the future. The network proposed by the ARL also serves as one input for national transport planning in Germany.

Following adoption in 2001 of the EU Directive on Strategic Environmental Impact Assessment (known as “Strategic EIA“ or “Plan EIA“), from 2004 onwards a large number of both comprehensive and sectoral plans will be subject to additional environmental impact assessment. Strategic EIA introduces, among other things, new requirements with regard to the plan-preparation phase, public participation and monitoring. It applies to plans and programmes in the fields of comprehensive superordinate spatial planning, land-use planning, agriculture, tourism, forestry, fishery, energy, industry, waste-management, watermanagement, telecommunications and transport planning. This article sets out the main implications of the Directive for the transport sector.

On the basis of representative postal surveys of the resident population of Dresden, an attempt is made to study changes between 1995 and 2000 both in living conditions and in levels of satisfaction with local infrastructure. Generally speaking, satisfaction follows changes in objective conditions. However, it is not determined solely by such changes: an important role has to be ascribed to cognitive tendencies of generalisation, and equally to personal experience and expectations on the part of informants. Differences in personal experience and in expectations can be seen as the principal reasons for the divergence in attitudes observed between informants who previously (prior to unification) lived in West Germany and native Dresdeners. The former tend to judge opportunities for shopping more negatively, but see the crime situation in more favourable terms.

Spatial development in eastern Germany in the ‘90s was marked to a very significant degree by processes of relatively small-scale suburbanisation; there are now clear signs of a change towards processes of large-scale disurbanisation with occasional tendencies towards reurbanisation. At the same time, new polarised development patterns are emerging. If we disregard a small number of islands of stability in a demographic landscape otherwise characterised by shrinkage, the pattern emerging is one of spatial clusters with above-average levels of population depletion, attributable both to natural wastage (more deaths than births) and to the absence of major migration streams. In the context of current developments, the losers are in particular the towns and cities. In view of the prevailing economic climate in eastern Germany, disurbanisation processes can be expected to continue unabated over large areas of the territory, with exceptions to this trend only in a few islands of reubanisation, such as the Leipzig and Dresden regions and the city-axis found in Thuringia.

The paper considers regional economic cycles as means for approaching regional sustainable development. By studying the case of materials management, logistics and transport, the main question is to what extent regional cycles may support the purpose of minimising freight transport. Since logistics is developing dynamically, and regarding the outstanding significance of economies of scale, strategies of regionalisation are increasingly questioned. Under the conditions of large-scale market integration, the resulting division of labor appears relatively efficient. So, regional cycles are challenged with particular respect to transport. Yet they remain important for social and economic reasons.

The effects of the process of EU enlargement will be felt in particular in Germany's “new states”, since here the price levels for electricity of industry are on average 11 % higher than in the “old states” (the former West Germany). Once the Czech Republic joins the EU, and following the ending of the so-called “brown-coal clause” (governing the use of brown coal in energy generation), imports of cheap electricity from the Czech Republic will increase and contribute to a fall in electricity prices in eastern Germany. This will in turn be a boon to competitiveness, particularly in such electricity-intensive sectors as the chemical industry. At the latest after 2008, when prices for district heating will also fall following the final depreciation of combined heat/ power units, there will be significant savings affecting the extra costs facing home-owners and tenants, making inner-city housing once again more attractive. This in turn is likely to have an impact on town-to-country (or centre-to-periphery) migration patterns. A fall in the price of electric heating will also favour low-energy construction since electric heating is the most costeffective means of meeting the low heating requirements of such buildings.

Recently, planning articles claim the introduction of controlling mechanisms in regional planning. The idea of controlling mechanisms in planning is not new, however, it has never been institutionalised. In Switzerland controlling mechanisms in spatial planning are strongly discussed since the middle of the nineties. At the moment efforts are carried out to integrate controlling mechanisms into cantonal guiding planning. Several cantonal spatial planning authorities are working on concepts for controlling mechanisms for cantonal guiding plans which correspond in content and scale to the German regional plans. The present article highlights the case study of the recently developed concept of controlling mechanisms for the guiding plan of the canton of Lucerne. Finally it discusses whether the approach can be transfered to regional planning in Germany.

Under the heading “Infill Management“, Berlin now details inner-city building land on the Internet. Since July 2002, information on over 800 publicly and privately owned development sites, covering a total of some 200 hectares, has been available worldwide in interactive form at one single website. A project group set up at the Senate Department of Urban Development has taken on responsibility for the organisational, legal and technical groundwork and for implementing this instrument — referred to as “BLM“ (Baulückenmanagement). What has become apparent is that viable solutions are possible, even within a complex administrative structure, if the focus is placed on achieving win-win solutions. In order to ensure that BLM continues in the future to find acceptance among users, it needs to be subjected to continuous evaluation. Moreover, everyone involved in this procedure must receive the necessary training. At a time of a general falling-off in demand for apartment-block construction, the underlying intention is to increase market transparency and to raise interest in Berlin as a place to locate to. An additional purpose of this approach is to support the sale of publicly owned real estate. The cadastral register of building land — introduced in 1998 in the Federal Building Code as an instrument of planning — represents one component of the inner-city development strategy currently being pursued in Berlin. The effective management of building land can, however, only be achieved by joining up housing, business, land and financial policies.

For many years a discussion has been in progress within regional research on the significance of regional corporate clusters, which in the light of the global reorganisation of value-added chains have come to take on a key function for spatial structure and in achieving greater efficiencies. The model of a regional production and redistribution network developed here takes as its starting-point the now familiar trend for businesses to focus on their core competencies and the ensuing need for relatively long-term, multilateral, project- and product-defined forms of co-operation in the form of physically compact networks. This is demonstrated by comparing this model with a more traditional system of spatial corporate organisation.

It is such all-embracing trends as “globalisation“ and “utilitarianism“ which shape the dominant framework conditions for urban development today throughout the world; there is comparatively little interest in utopias or high-flown visions. And yet spatial planning does require suitably concrete visions of what it aspires to achieve and to effect. Taking as a suitable case for study the largest and economically most potent metropolis in China, this article provides a synopsis of three quarters of a century of development in examining the relationship between actual developments in settlement structure and the visions on which it was — and is — based.