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11/15/2023 | Wissenschaftliche Standpunkte

Accelerate housing construction yes - but no return to the concepts of the 1970s, please!

Housing construction should be accelerated in a different way than Chancellor Olaf Scholz suggested at a "Heilbronner Stimme" event, according to "Der Spiegel" - that is the opinion of Prof. Dr. Uwe Altrock, urban researcher at the University of Kassel and head of the DFG-funded Research Group "Urban Expansion in Times of Reurbanization": "Instead of building new large housing estates on greenfield sites as in the 1970s, it is important to create socially and functionally mixed, traffic-reduced, well-greened neighbourhoods for living and working and to focus primarily on the further development of existing buildings." Parking lots or derelict commercial areas could be converted, for example.

Olaf Scholz's call for many new large housing estates runs counter to the German government's sustainability strategy, which has been trying for many years to make urban development as space-saving as possible and to focus on inner-city development. "Even if it is currently becoming more difficult to repurpose available brownfield sites in cities, the focus should continue to be on mobilizing underused areas in existing buildings. This includes large parking lots, derelict office and commercial sites and many other areas that can be revitalized through redensification," says Altrock, who heads the Department of Urban Regeneration and Planning Theory at the University of Kassel.

"Experience in cities such as Hamburg, Freiburg, Munich, Vienna, Zurich and Frankfurt am Main also shows that new urban expansions that are already planned or under construction can and must look very different from those of the 1970s. A wide range of sustainability innovations are being tested in terms of construction, energy and transport, as well as in the creation of entire new urban districts, and these need to be promoted. The concept of the 15-minute city, which aims to provide people on the outskirts of the city with schools, kindergartens, recreational areas, shopping facilities, workplaces and everything they need in their everyday lives in their immediate vicinity and thus also promote resource-saving forms of mobility such as walking and cycling, deserves particular attention."

Contact:

Uwe Altrock
University of Kassel
altrock[at]asl.uni-kassel[dot]de
0561/804-3225

Further information:

Spiegel online from November 13:
https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/wohnraum-scholz-will-20-neue-stadtteile-bauen-wie-in-den-siebzigerjahren-a-9a25f84e-6fcc-48c3-bd36-0a8c764ba46d

More about the DFG project "Urban expansion in times of reurbanization:
https://www.uni-kassel.de/fb06/en/infothek/sitemap-news-detail/2023/03/27/dfg-foerdert-forschungsgruppe-stadterweiterung-in-zeiten-der-reurbanisierung-neue-sub-urbanitaet?cHash=d6f7d08d933b202f37bb36dc8517d123

Uwe Altrock will lead a public event on sustainable urban development on Friday, November 17: 9 to 11 a.m., UNI:Lokal, Wilhelmsstraße 21, Kassel. More: file://///smb-verw.its.uni-kassel.de/uk014669/Downloads/SDGplusLab-Festivalprogramm-Faltblatt_2023-11-07_GD-1.pdf