Tom 61 (2003): Zeszyt 5 (September 2003)

There remains today little in common between the concept underlying the phenomenon we refer to as “the city”, on the one hand, and the actual reality we can observe and experience. One reason for this is the apparently insatiable desire on the part of large groups in society for a home of their own in a leafy environment; for distance from the hectic, noisy, polluted and increasingly hazardous city centre; for greater closeness to nature; for a sense of belonging to a community, which is seen to guarantee greater security, peace and quiet and social homogeneity; for an environment more child-friendly than that found in the inner city. In stark contrast to any discourse on the subject of urbanity — and reaffirmed impressively yet again just recently in both surveys and empirical studies — for many people a home of their own, with garden, is now well established as the very epitome of how they would ideally like to live. And it is this — admittedly among other factors — which generates suburbanisation. Even accepting that sprawling settlement development by no means represents a lack of planning, but is rather the result of conflicting and — over the course of time — mutually neutralising values with regard to what we think cities can and should be; and granting too that every municipality thinks first and foremost — as indeed it is required to — of its own best interests: nonetheless, what we refer to as “urban sprawl” should not simply be stigmatised or accepted as an unalterable fact of life. On the contrary: suburbanisation needs to be seen, to a much greater degree than has previously been the case, as a challenge for urban development, as a sign of a need to envision spatial concepts which take into account both the housing market and individual aspirations with regard to housing.

Up to the 1980s, urban property development and management in Western Europe was structured by local conditions and actors. This has changed due to strengthened demand for office space, new forms of real estate financing and an increased market transparency as a consequence of political deregulation. At present, these changes go along with a mobilization of the urban property market and a shift from an use value perspective to an exchange value orientation. What kind of challenges and possibilities arise from these transformations for the urban property development? Does an increased importance of supraregional and shareholder value oriented property developers and investors imply a dependency of urban (property) development on mobile investments? In this article these questions will be answered by analyzing the effects of the reorganization of the real estate industry and the restructuring of urban policy.

A comparison of the differences in land consumption in England and Germany as well as an analysis of the general conditions of the English planning system show how blatant the differences between the two industrial countries are and deliver the initial explanations for the differences. In the year 2001, 40ha/year/100,000 residents were consumed in Germany (not considering recreational areas). In contrast, the corresponding statistic in England was merely 12.7 ha. The essential reasons for the success of the English system in this area of policy making seems to lie in: the English planning system, the emphasis of recycling unused plots of land within towns and the preservation of “Green Belts” as well as the English taxation system. The English example gives reason to once again contemplate the relatively high strength of community planning interests in German spatial planning. Also without major changes in the planning system, measures such as the reduction of economic incentives that promote land consumption and the further development of concepts for tradable land use permits in connection/cooperation/combination with spatial planning.

Sustainability indicators are regarded as vital instruments for the successful implementation of sustainable spatial development. However, many previous approaches have limited themselves to an essentially descriptive or reporting function. The fact that many concepts fail to go beyond enumerating desirable indicators has meant that in most cases these indicators do not end up being properly integrated within the planning and decision-making processes of regional and state-level spatial planning. This article discusses a number of possible ways of refining sustainability indicators as demonstrated by a monitoring and controlling system for the land-use type ”commercial space“. Whereas other studies on the topic of regional sustainability indicators have tended to concentrate primarily on the goal of regional comparisons and rankings, the approach discussed here aims to show how indicators may be put to use as tools within the planning process. Consequently, the monitoring- and controlling-based approach is not presented simply in abstract or theoretical terms, but is rather underpinned by a review of the results of its application in the Eastern Thuringia region as an illustration of the benefits it promises for planning practice.

The article considers the question to what extent co-operations can strengthen the central place system as a concept of spatial planning. The legitimacy of the central place system as part of classical spatial planning that acts in a sovereign way is questioned. Here the focus is put on the application of the principle of functionality instead of the conventional principle of territoriality in the allocation of central place functions. The policy impacts of urban associations and shared central places that have been tested in spatial planning practice in this respect suffer from the lack of a binding agreement on the distribution of functions. In this context the author introduces the spatial planning contract as a possible solution and discusses it using the example of the Dessau area.

The catastrophic flooding of recent years has revealed the inadequacy of formally defined flood-protection areas as a means of guaranteeing the necessary levels of containment in water meadows. If we are to effectively alleviate the gravity of such critical cases of flooding, it will be necessary both to restore the water-retention spaces previously maintained, and also to create additional flood plains. As a precautionary measure, where land has already been earmarked (including for development) to serve these purposes, it will be particularly vital to ensure that this intention is not thwarted by permitting conflicting land uses. This is the prime task of regional planning, and, in the form of what are termed „area development plans”, it has at its disposal in North Rhine-Westphalia a sophisticated and effective array of planning instruments capable of meeting the key requirement of precautionary flood protection, namely that of securing the spaces required, initially by indicating them as „flood areas”, and subsequently by designating them specifically for this purpose within legally-binding land-use plans. This article describes the scope for action available in spatial planning as reflected in regional planning in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.