An area covering more than two football pitches is built over for settlement and traffic purposes every day in the Rhine-Neckar metropolitan region. These areas, most of which were previously used for agriculture, thereby lose a large part of their environmental, food production-related or local recreational functionality. Set against the background of demographic change, an uninhibited expansion of settlement areas may also be impractical from an economical point of view. Above all, falling population figures and an, on average, increasingly aging population will make it more and more difficult for many towns and municipalities to preserve the infrastructures linked with settlement areas such as roads, water and sewage pipelines, or even kindergartens.
For this reason, a strategic and implementation-oriented space management policy is intended to at least slow down the building over of previously open spaces. One of the specific goals is to utilise unused spaces in inner communities more efficiently, for example by redeveloping derelict factory sites.
Raum+ Rhein-Neckar
Until now, there has been a widespread lack of basic information about the potential for inner development available in the Rhine-Neckar metropolitan region. The potential for inner development is understood to encompass properties in towns or municipalities which are no longer or only inadequately structurally utilised. Specifically, this may be an unused railway station, for instance, or an empty factory building or even disused spaces in town centres, which could sensibly be used for building purposes.
This potential for inner development is pinpointed within the framework of the "Raum+ Rhein-Neckar" project in co-operation with all 149 local authority districts in the metropolitan region. The result of the survey documents just short of 1,400 potential sites located in community centres with a total area in excess of 1,800 hectares. This is approximately equivalent to the settlement area of Speyer! Since the conclusion of the "Raum+ Rhein-Neckar" project in 2009, there now exists a sound basis for strategically and extensively tackling the reuse of potential inner development sites.
The results are documented in detail in the project's final report.
Raum+ Aktiv
On account of the extensively available potential for inner development in the metropolitan region, it is planned to focus on the concrete development of these areas. To achieve this, the project "Raum+ AKTIV – Activating inner-community potential" was conceived with the aim of developing solutions in selected model local authority districts to demonstrate how disused areas in inner communities can be revitalised. Its goal is to clarify any unexplained issues to such an extent that building can begin immediately after the project has finished. Raum+ AKTIV is scheduled to last for two years and was started in the winter of 2009. Further information can be found in the project brochure.