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Urban Renewal - A Look Back to the Future. The Importance of Models in Renewing Urban Planning
Johann Jessen
Urban Renewal - A Look Back to the Future. The Importance of Models in Renewing Urban Planning
1. Urban Planning - an Innovative Field?
2. Innovation Media
3. Innovation Mechanisms
3.1 Changes in Model as Renewal of Intra-Disciplinary Consensus
3.2 The model as a frame of reference for learning processess
4. Innovative Impetus and Models in Urban Renewal
4.1 Internal Innovative Impetus - Local Authority Pioneers
4.2 Top-down innovative impetus - demanding and promoting
4.3 Lateral innovative impetus - visions and experiments
5. Prospects- Models and Experiments
Summary:
The quest of recent years for urban regeneration concepts in shrinking cities is the background to an examination of renewal mechanisms in urban planning. How is the discipline of urban planning to come by new insights and substantive orientations, improved methods, procedures, organisational and financing models? Urban planning employs a range of media to renew itself: competitions, prototypes, building exhibitions, and urban research. The mechanisms that bring about these innovations and the importance that models assume in them change with the conception of problems and tasks characteristic of urban planning in each successive historical phase. The stimulus for renewal in current urban regeneration comes from individual communities, from the responsible institutions of state and federal government, which provide the required financial support, and from within society.
Over the past five years, local planning authorities, especially in shrinking East German cities, have been laboratories where, accompanied by an abundance of welcome and unwelcome advice, new planning strategies and concepts have been developed for a task without precedent - at least in Germany. Instead of controlling and organising growth processes in space, planning has had to cope with shrinking cities. Prototypes are being developed, new categories for describing, analysing, and planning are being tested; new concepts and actor constellations, cooperation with neighbouring disciplines are being experimented with. Seldom has so much innovative effort been invested by the planning profession in so brief a period. But it remains to be seen how shrinking cities will develop and what role urban planning can play at all. The "built city under pressure for change" has put the discipline of urban planning under pressure to innovate.
In the light of the latest "innovation surge," this article examines renewal mechanisms in urban planning in some detail. How is the discipline to come by new insights and substantive orientations, improved methods, procedures, organisational and financing models? This raises a number of questions: 1) How appropriate is it to speak of innovation in urban planning? 2.) What media does urban planning employ to renew itself? 3.) What renewal mechanisms have developed independently of specific problem fields and the changing conception of the function of urban planning? How important are models in this context? 4.) What drives renewal in the context of the new urban planning tasks?
1. Urban Planning - an Innovative Field?
There are always two sides to the concept of innovation.(1) In the first place, innovation is the successful implementation of new ideas; an idea is innovative only if it reaches implementation. Secondly, the concept includes the notion that innovation sooner or later brings about changes in broad, established practices, that an idea can be not only implemented but can also gain practical recognition.
Certain obvious objections can rightly be levelled at the transfer of the concept to urban planning, be it as "product innovation" or "process innovation" (Selle 2004). Planning activities are always caught between continuity and renewal (Jessen/Reuter 2006). Given the long-term nature of planning, keeping to tried and tested objectives and procedures is necessary for success. But to avoid unfruitful routine, mechanisms have also become established in carefully managed planning institutions that promote the capacity of the institution for substantive and processual renewal. They include continuing education, consultation of external experts, the involvement of young firms, "evaluation loops" and monitoring systems, an open discussion culture, dialogue with "uncomfortable" cooperation partners. However, one can only speak of innovation if the novel developments introduced in this manner have an impact over and beyond the specific city or public authority and become a model for others, thus gaining recognition and becoming embodied in legal instruments, subsidy guidelines, and other norms and standards.
On the other hand, urban planning is always place-related, and innovations that take effect do so initially at the local level alone, and generally only if the circumstances are right: a specific constellation, a propitious moment; and they apply only in a particular case. There are narrow limits to the accumulation of experience and its transfer to other cases, to the generalisation of knowledge as the key prerequisite of innovation. Whether and to what extent new solutions are transferable to other cities must thus be considered anew in each and every case. The general setting for urban planning is also continuously changing, so that planning routines can be called into question not only because there are better solutions for the same problem on offer but also because new starting situations repeatedly require new concepts. Moreover, urban planning is always integrated into a political process. Within his own area of action, the municipal urban planner is only one of many agents; he accordingly has only limited control over boundary conditions and over the possibility of implementing new concepts.
Pinpointing innovation in urban planning is not made any easier by the extreme fluctuation to which, for obvious reasons, appraisal of succeeding epochs and their built testimony can be subject. One example: reconstruction planning oriented on the historical city in Freiburg, Freudenstadt, and elsewhere, which was reviled by contemporaries as behind the times is now generally appreciated. Reconstruction as in Kassel or Hanover that espoused modern planning concepts with particular enthusiasm was considered far-sighted at the time but is now often denounced as the second destruction of the city.
A final and even more fundamental objection to the notion of innovation in urban planning is the claim that the thinking associated with this concept is wholly committed to the faith in progress professed by the early phase of modern urban planning - quite apart from the fact that the term has become more than hackneyed from overuse in advertising.
These objections may be well founded, and there is no disputing that every reasonable notion of innovation needs to be adapted to the special context of urban planning, whose problematique this article can barely outline. Urban planning must be understood as a process liable to political and social revision and not as the straightforward expansion and renewal of a canon of goals and procedures. Nevertheless, the discipline has itself undeniably generated media to monitor its own content and procedures and, where necessary, to call them into question and renew them.
2. Innovation Media
By what criteria does the substantive, conceptual, and methodological repertoire of urban planning develop? Is there an established reservoir of knowledge or fund of experience on which to draw in preparation for future tasks? At issue are the processes and media of self-renewal for a discipline as a whole. Without claiming to present a complete list, four very different media can be identified in urban planning through which learning processes are organised, innovative concepts developed and tested, and experience systematically processed (Jessen 1997, 67):
- the competition system
- urban prototypes
- building exhibitions
- applied urban research.
A very important and probably historically the oldest way to find the best solution for complex urban planning problems is the system of urban development competitions, which is particularly highly developed and formalised in Germany. In "noble contest," a good solution for a specific planning task is sought, and often found, in accordance with set rules. The competition system also indirectly performs an important, additional function for participants, sponsors, and the expert public. It allows them to escape everyday routine and, through their own concerted work or through the proposals of others, to attain new perspectives on a subject. Despite all the well-known problems that have accompanied the competition system from the outset, the competition culture not only contributes to the self-understanding of the discipline but generates innovative impetus that diffuses beyond the case on hand and makes an impact in the public sphere (Becker 1992). Competition entries that have not won have always had a major stimulating impact precisely because their approach goes beyond the concrete case.
Another source of inspiration for urban planning is the prototype solutions architects and urban planners have repeatedly developed, and which have reached implementation. A history of modern urban planning could be written in terms of such emblematic prototypes, reference examples which have more frequently functioned as models in the history of ideas than having a widespread concrete impact: they range from Ebenezer Howard's garden city idea to the development concept in Radburn, the invention and construction of the urban freeway system in New York associated with the name of Robert Moses, and single planning elements like Le Corbusier's unité d'habitation, Victor Gruen's shopping mall, or Peter Faller's terrace house. And when urban planning turned to the inherited building stock, planning projects whose authorship was no longer so easy to determine exerted widespread influence on the expert discourse through their goals, conceptual approaches, or procedural models. Outstanding examples were the redevelopment of the old city centre in Bologna and the strategies for Kreuzberg SO 36 in the 1970s, the Parc de la Villette in Paris, or the municipal programmes for redesigning public squares in Barcelona in the 1980s, the redevelopment of the Amsterdam Eastern Docklands (Borneo-Sporenburg) or conversion of the Tübingen Südstadt in the 1990s.
Building exhibitions are a particularly effective medium for organising innovation in urban planning. However, past exhibitions have tended less to present new developments than to provide a common platform for existing, scattered new projects. They have been expositions of the architectural avant-garde rendered respectable by new currents in architecture (Pehnt 1992). On this pattern, for example, the Berlin International Building Exhibition (IBA) in 1984/87 doubtless contributed to a breakthrough for post-modern architecture. Furthermore, with the concepts of "critical reconstruction of the city" and "careful urban renewal" it gave new impetus to local authority practice in urban regeneration and housing stock policy. This was even more true of the IBA Emscher Park , which was designed from the outset as a "workshop for the renewal of old industrial areas" (memorandum of the IBA Emscher Park ). It was intended not only to stimulate the ecological, economic, and social redevelopment of the northern Ruhr District but also to find transferable concepts for planning problems facing all industrial countries (Ganser et al. 1993).(2) The IBA Urban Redevelopment currently being prepared by the Bauhaus Dessau in Saxony-Anhalt is intended as a platform for "urban experiments" rather than as a stage for guest appearances by the architectural avant-garde.
Finally, applied urban research seeks to stimulate the substantive and methodological renewal of local authority planning practice. For over thirty years research has been conducted by state and federal government authorities responsible for planning and building and by urban research institutes. The addressees of such research are mainly local and regional administrative authorities, which expect the scientific monitoring of pilot projects to provide helpful advice and recommendations on planning contents and methods, and on legal instruments and development tools. The times are long since past when local government planning practitioners regarded urban research as an unprofitable activity because of the presumed impracticality or banality of the results. Reassessment of the benefits urban research can offer local authority practitioners has certainly been helped by the establishment of research fields in experimental housing and urban development (ExWoSt) by the federal ministry responsible for building (current name: Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Urban Development/BMVBS). The back-up research for innovative pilot projects supported by the Federal Ministry of Building and organised by the Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning (BBR) has thus come closer to concrete implementation. It directly involves local authorities and other agencies, and is often designed as action research in the sense that the research process itself is intended, over and above its advisory and experimental functions, to improve the planning and implementation of the project under study. Furthermore, government research has been endeavouring for years to inform and improve local authority planning with the aid of best practices documentation and international comparative research.
3. Innovation Mechanisms
The impetus given by all four media, and the knowledge they generate can but need not be taken into account in practice. Every local urban planner is free to adopt the results and recommendations of urban research, but he can also reject or simply ignore them. Nevertheless, a collective renewal takes place through an abundance of single decisions. The mechanisms of this renewal change with shifts in the prevailing perception of problems among planners and with the tasks they address. This is evident in the differing importance and functions that models assume in these mechanisms. Roughly speaking, three phases of urban planning can be distinguished in Germany:
- Until about 1970, urban planning basically meant guiding and designing urban growth by extending developed areas - an essentially technical and design discipline with urban expansion as a key planning task.
- From the mid-1970s, the rehabilitation and modernisation of the building stock became key challenges in local planning. The aim was to control and shape urban growth through the more intensive use of existing structures, but also to ensure and channel growth through the effective protection of natural resources. The task of urban renewal generated a broader conception of planning that included social and ecological dimensions and produced new planning law and development tools.
- Since 2000, a growing number of local authorities have faced the new task of coping with shrinkage processes through planning under the ambiguous heading of "Stadtumbau," urban redevelopment. As far as can be seen to date, this also requires a newly adapted understanding of planning that includes the cultural dimension. A new planning repertoire and new support instruments are currently being tested.
These phases differ not only in the principal problem fields addressed by urban development, in the conceptions of planning adapted to these problems, and in the legal, organisational, and promotional framework, but also in the mechanisms by which the discipline renews itself in content and method. This is evident, for example, in the pre-eminent role models have always played a in this renewal mechanism, a role that has varied considerably.
3.1 Changes in Model as Renewal of Intra-Disciplinary Consensus
Changes in the substantive orientation of post-war urban planning until about 1970 are generally described in terms of a succession of differing models, exemplified by the urban expansion type each model represented for the first time or with particular emphasis (deconcentrated and differentiated city; the automobile city and urbanity through density).(3) The innovation mechanisms predominating in this phase can also be regarded as a change of model. The crux is the renewal of consensus between architects and urban planners; it has been achieved in a complex process of discussion nurtured through the media mentioned above like urban planning competitions, the model offered by exemplary housing developments in other European countries (especially Scandinavian city extensions and English new towns) (Kähler 2000, 949 f.) and building exhibitions (Interbau Berlin), and diffused by influential specialist publications and congresses. The real "basis of power" for this self-conception of the discipline has been publicly assisted housing, which could often underpin the notion that the city can be comprehensively shaped and designed, since in this phase it was the major factor in the development of city extensions. The current problems with the large-scale housing developments from this period are an inheritance from this alliance between self-confident experts and an "empowered" housing industry.
3.2 The model as a frame of reference for learning processess
As urban planning tackled the regeneration of historic cores and late Gründerzeit neighbourhoods in the early 1970s and was obliged to deal with the inherited building stock, the planning context expanded. Public participation politicised the process and extended the circle of actors involved. The environmental debate added key substantive dimensions and imposed greater cooperation with other disciplines; procedural requirements were tightened by federal and state government development-promotion programmes. Government research created a discourse framework of its own, oriented more and more strongly on the problems of local planning. Models embodying an exclusively intra-disciplinary consensus were thus deprived of their basis. But they remained important for the self-reassurance of the discipline, with, however, a different significance and in a completely different context.
Implicitly, the model of the European city had been accepted from as long ago as the mid-1970s as the most important normative frame of reference for urban planning and development; it is rooted in the reorientation of urban regeneration from area rehabilitation to heritage-preserving renovation, backed socially by the civic action movement or - as we would probably put it today - by broad civil-society engagement for the "home town." Even then, at least in West Germany, it had in practice displaced the modernist, functionalist model of urban development. The rehabilitation and modernisation of historic urban cores and Gründerzeit neighbourhoods sought to preserve the urban cultural heritage, as well as existing mixed structures and organic social ties.
Quasi-officially and with application to almost the entire planning spectrum, the "compact city" or "European city" model came to bear only in the course of the 1990s.(4) Over the past decade, it has become established at programmatic and pronouncement level, achieving, as it were, hegemonic status, and is to be found in statutes, programmes, and plans throughout space-related policy: in EU manifestoes, in the latest urban development reports of the federal government, in updated state development plans, in all almost all urban development plans for major German cities, and in programme objectives for the planning of new urban areas.
In contrast to earlier models, this one has gained such widespread acceptance because it is far more than an intra-disciplinary convention. It assembles ecological, social, political, economic, and cultural demands for future urban development in a single, familiar image. It is therefore endorsed by a wide range of disciplines and areas of public policy (Jessen 2000).(5)
The function of models for the self-renewal of urban planning and urban development practice has changed accordingly. Whereas in the 1950s and 1960s, this renewal proceeded by shifts in model, since the 1980s the European city model has provided a stable frame of reference enjoying a high degree of societal consensus within which practitioners have developed and refined new content and procedures. The essence of the innovation mechanism in this phase is no long a change in model but collective learning processes in a fixed framework. This can be demonstrated in two spheres of urban planning in the 1990s: the development of new urban areas and the regeneration of historic urban cores in East Germany.
New urban areas
The wave of building large, new developments on the urban fringe and on vacant sites has ebbed. Some have been completed, others are growing more slowly than originally planned or have been deliberately designed for gradual growth. Most of the completed neighbourhoods have still to prove their qualities in everyday life now that they are no longer major building sites. Nevertheless, an appraisal of the function of models can be attempted (cf. detailed treatment in Jessen [2004, 93 f.]).
With respect to new neighbourhoods like Hamburg - Allermöhe-West, Frankfurt - Deutschherrenufer, Freiburg - Rieselfeld or Ostfildern - Scharnhauser Park it was stressed at an early stage that professional urban-planning models had been superseded by a pragmatic pluralism open to a variety of planning conceptions and procedural concepts (Fuhrich 1995, 707 f.). For example, in and around Berlin alone new suburbs were built that, like Falkensee - Falkenhöh, formally followed the model of early modern planning or which drew resolutely on the repertoire of the 19 th century city, like Potsdam-Kirchsteigfeld. Furthermore, the new suburbs drew on numerous concepts developed and tested as prototypes and modules in the 1980s (Jessen/Simon 2001, 371 f.). The new neighbourhoods were not primarily experimental fields or built manifestations of urban planning models. They were the outcome of experience for which the urban structural and cultural model of the European city provided the general frame of reference. The extended planning and realisation period of the projects, the modular structure of housing and urban development, the obligation to stay close to the market and transform planning from a purely technical and disciplinary concern to a subject of public debate has had a stronger impact on these development projects than any planning model defined solely within the profession could ever exert. The possibilities for subsequent adjustment and correction that opening up the temporal, technical, economic, and political dimensions of planning offered a strong contrast to development of the large West German housing estates of the 1960s and 1970s and East Germany's prefabricated housing developments. They suggest that these areas, even on the outskirts of the city, could be spared the brief and depressing "career" of many of their predecessors in newly developed or regenerated areas - not because one model had been replaced by another but because collective learning processes have taken place, and an element of reflection has become entrenched in urban planning.
Regeneration of historic urban cores in the new federal states
One of the urban planning priorities in the new federal states and a focus of development promotion was regeneration of historic cores and Gründerzeit neighbourhoods in the context of the "Urban Heritage Conservation" programme. There is broad agreement that an extraordinary job of rehabilitation has been accomplished in the past fifteen years.(6) The historic city centres, which had been neglected for decades, were preserved from final decay at an astonishing pace. This success is certainly a direct consequence of the concentration of urban development promotion funding in the new federal states. But a decisive role is also likely to have been played by the tried and tested routine on which planning, preparation, and implementation was now able to rely, a routine which had developed in urban renewal in the sense of heritage-preserving renovation since the mid-1970s in West Germany. The dead-ends and detours almost always associated with the regeneration of historic city centres in West Germany, which protracted the process and burdened it with conflict, were largely avoided. This is another reason why the success of urban renewal became visible so much earlier. The model of the European city provided the overall frame of reference for the renewal of historic cores in East Germany, too. The experience gathered by the profession in earlier years in West Germany bore fruit - collective learning processes came to bear.
Until the mid-1990s, urban planning and development was regarded as an established element in an efficient welfare state of the old type: with relatively full employment, continually growing societal affluence, and differentiated social systems. Its contribution was, and to some extent still is to ensure equivalent living conditions, to control growth, and to strike a balance between the public interest and private interests, especially in order to save natural resources. Within this conception, something in the way of a placid routine developed in urban planning on the basis of saturated experience. Urban planning has made use of a range of media like competitions, research promotion programmes, best practices, and exchanges among colleagues in the repeated pursuit of self-renewal within its own frame of reference and in order to broaden the range of options at its disposal - beyond all weighty debate about visions and models. But the regeneration of East German city centres also demonstrates in exemplary fashion what limits there are to such learning processes, and calls in question the model of the European city as a general frame of reference. This innovation mechanism operates effectively only if the main underlying conditions remain constant. The assumption that urban renewal in East Germany was taking place under boundary conditions comparable to those prevailing in West Germany was quite plausible in the first half of the 1990s, but it proved mistaken in view of the dramatic population losses the East was suffering - witness the elaborately rehabilitated but vacant historic buildings in many of East Germany's historic city centres.
4. Innovative Impetus and Models in Urban Renewal
Particularly in East German cities, the transformations that go under the heading of "shrinking cities" have meanwhile been impressively illustrated (Kil 2004) and statistically underpinned (Gatzweiler et al. 2003, 557). The visible phenomena concomitant with "de-economisation, depopulation, and disurbanisation" (Hannemann 2004, 200 f.) have often been vividly described and exemplified: extensive brownfield and derelict commercial sites, streets with many vacant shops, housing, and offices, dilapidated factory and residential buildings, underutilised social and technical infrastructure, neglected parks and squares.
This new starting situation posed completely new challenges for local government policy and urban planning. Learning is no longer an effective innovation mechanism because of the experience already gathered. For over five years now, policy and planning concepts have been developed and implemented, discussions conducted on how to resolve or mitigate the problems caused by urban shrinkage, or to give them a turn for the better (shrinkage as opportunity). This is not innovation in the sense described above, of reliable routines growing from new concepts and procedures, but rather the state of the art (Reuther 2003, 575). Since urban redevelopment is in all probability a long-term task, this cannot be otherwise. And, accordingly, no renewal mechanism can yet be identified. It is still a lively search involving a lot of people. But different contexts can be identified in which new procedures, new approaches, new concepts for urban planning in "shrinking cities" can be sought:
- internal innovative impetus: first approaches have been developed by practitioners in committed local authorities facing specific problems (see 4.1);
- top-down innovative impetus: especially the rapidly organised federal ministry Urban Renewal East programme (4.2);
- lateral innovative impetus: one example is the recently completed project "Shrinking Cities" financed by the Cultural Foundation of the Federal Government (4.3).
4.1 Internal Innovative Impetus - Local Authority Pioneers
It took some years before East German cities were able to accept the fact of shrinkage. The "perception barriers" (Becker 2006, 3) were high. Leipzig was one of the first cities to regain scope for action by overcoming collective self-deception, to call a spade a spade, and to find a striking term to describe the situation, the "perforated city" (Lütke-Daldrup 2001; Reuther 2003, 579). Leipzig was also one of the first cities to re-orient its urban development policy: the updated subplans of its district development plan include prototypes for planning instruments, planning categories with criteria for differential intervention intensity and priorities, and forms of presentation (Stadt Leipzig 2000), which served as models for many others. The conceptual district plan for Leipzig East, prepared by the Office for Urban Projects on behalf of the municipality and the pioneering approaches to inner-city open-space planning developed by the Berlin landscape planning firm bgmr are emblematic and category-forming achievements. Finally, participation in the Federal Ministry for Education and Research consortium project "City 2030" allowed the municipality to place future urban development strategies on a more reliable information basis by elaborating scenarios (Pfeiffer/Porsch 2004, 17), to develop various spatial models (Doehler-Behzadi/Schiffers 2004, 32), and to learn from foreign cities' experience with urban renewal (Hall/Mace 2004, 82).
Leipzig urban development planning over the past five years has offered a particularly striking example of new conceptual planning approaches developed on the basis of practical experience (cf. in general also Jessen/Selle [2001, 289]). But it is not the only example: another remarkable case is the conversion project for the Tübingen Südstadt (Feldtkeller 1994/2001). The purpose was to elaborate strategies to regain scope for local planning on the basis of the procedure itself. Whether individual successes can be generalised largely remains to be seen. The emerging success of urban development policy in Leipzig , apparent in the attraction of major companies (BMW, Porsche), in a slight increase in population, and in an image enhanced by the nationally successful Olympic Games application, provides no indication of whether this development will continue. The Leipzig strategy is far from being a blueprint for other shrinking cities: not as long as constant or sinking distributable resources mean that the success of one city lessens the chances of others.
4.2 Top-down innovative impetus - demanding and promoting
Preparations for the Urban Renewal East (2001) and Urban Renewal West (2002) development-promotion programmes provided top-down stimulus for innovation. The former, prompted not least of all by the local housing industry, was a rapid response by the competent federal ministry to the urgent problems facing East German cities. Impetus was expected above all from the municipal integrated urban development concepts required firstly by East German state governments and shortly thereafter by the federal government as a precondition for any grants. Strategies for coping with structural housing vacancies were to be integrated into superordinate urban development ideas. Local authorities were aided in two ways (Haller et al. 2001, 125). In the context of the federal competition "Urban Renewal East. For Liveable Cities and Attractive Housing," intended as start-up phase, local authorities were provided with funding to develop integrated urban development concepts and with aids-to-work including detailed requirements and guidelines on contents and procedures for the new task (BMVBW 2001).(7) The integrated urban development concept aims to elaborate ideas about the future development of the city in consultation with the housing industry: "the framework development goals and priorities of the city and the city region are to be elaborated and adopted as a fundamental model for both the city as a whole and for districts with special development needs" (Haller et al., 129).
Striking in these integrated approaches is the abundance of urban structure models, of urban development models in their traditional form but with a contrary function. On the basis of the same parameters, like density, function, centre distribution, and overall development, illustrative spatial statements are now made about the intended direction and intensity not of urban growth but of shrinkage.(8) A comparative analysis of the integrated urban development concepts elaborated in the context of the competition shows that "Cities with a large stock of old buildings usually make explicit reference to their urban tradition from the 19th century or early phases of development. Many concepts accept a commitment to the tradition of the "European city" and pursue the downsizing of the urban fringe, the strengthening of the inner city, and the integration of green and open spaces. Other cities, especially so-called "development cities" in the former GDR, take a self-confident attitude towards the heritage of the classical and socialist modern period and the principles of the structured city." (Röding/Veith 2003, 664).(9) Concern expressed that the models would cling to the image of the European city and consider shrinkage into the bounds of the pre-modern urban core as the sole option proved groundless (Hesse 2005).
Nevertheless, many consider shrinkage from within, the loss of axes, the creeping deconcentration of the core city as major threats to the socio-spatial coherence of the city. Cities with an historical identity clearly have an easier time with urban renewal in the long perspective than cities whose physical identity has been lost through war damage or later demolition, or which never had such an identity owing to their specific history, for instance as industrial cities. The model of the European city as a frame of reference for local authority action may thus survive the paradigmatic shift to urban regeneration in shrinking cities.
In federal urban renewal programmes, too, continuity is evident in the demands and expectations the federal and state governments address to local authorities and in the hopes set in the legal and promotional tools with which local authorities are to be supported. Continuity is called for in local-authority responsibility for safeguarding socio-spatial coherence in the city as a whole. Apart from the integrated urban development concept required for sub-area planning and support for housing demolition, there are no fundamental differences from classical urban development promotion, despite the sometimes dramatically different starting position for local policy in shrinking cities.
But it is doubtful whether this really suffices. In shrinking cities, classical renewal promotion fails to trigger a multiple of private investment through targeted grants, directing existing and hidden growth potential and resources towards the areas to be regenerated. Moreover, all public and private investment comes up against limits in declining areas - banks now practise "redlining" in Germany, too: they are unwilling to grant loans. The response in Britain was to make urban regeneration a national policy priority and to earmark a great deal more funding, because, as experience had shown, only far-reaching but carefully targeted preparatory input by the public sector in the qualitative improvement of inner cities brings any real prospect of success.
Experience has also shown, not least of all in West Germany, that land law needs to be adapted to the requirements of urban renewal. The availability of support can oblige proprietors neither to invest themselves nor to sell their devalued properties at a price close to the actual fair market value, which can considerably hamper the progress of regeneration. There is a lack of legal options for "activating" real property.
Finally, the mandatory integrated urban development concept should really be expanded into an integrated regional development concept. Only on the regional scale can duplicate investment be prevented in competing for population and jobs. This is the only way to avoid greater landscape consumption despite a surplus of buildings and serviced land. This could lower the risk of desperate action by local authorities in the form of dubious beacon projects, make more efficient use of public finance in adapting the technical and social infrastructure (especially the network infrastructure) to changing demand, and regain scope for local government action beyond mandatory functions.
4.3 Lateral innovative impetus - visions and experiments
The third source of stimulus to innovation in the planning debate on urban renewal is markedly aloof from local planning practice and from traditional development-promotion practice and government research. A prime example is the "Shrinking Cities" project funded by the Cultural Foundation of the Federal Government and monitored by the Bauhaus Dessau, the journal "archplus" and the Kunstgalerie Leipzig (Oswalt 2005a/2005b).
The formal practice of urban renewal is considered, at best, pointless: "For years now, innumerable blueprints have been produced for handling the shrinkage of East German cities in expert reports and urban development concepts, in competitions and under direct contract without this having any noticeable effect of any sort. For projects are based on growth-oriented planning models that are unavailing in the face of urban shrinkage. The plans are obsolete from the outset." (Oswalt 2005a, 18). From this perspective, models are rejected; they are regarded as part and parcel of the traditional repertoire and old thinking. "Models are elements of political orientation and authoritarian control in a hierarchical planning culture concerned with purposeful action in an orderly system of predictable events. Open-ended test activities in experimental design are directed not towards art-assisted culturalisation but towards the politicisation of design practice" (von Börries/Prigge 2005, 29 f.).
The "Shrinking Cities" project accordingly encouraged concepts and provided a platform for existing initiatives that articulated political, cultural, and social alternatives. The concepts presented in this splendid isolation - including the award-winning proposals of an international competition for young architects and artists (10) - were both stimulating and disparate. They constitute a sort of cabinet of urban experimental curiosities: art actions (cows for Toxteth/Liverpool), manifesto-like pronouncements, difficult to follow intellectual games (data museums), adventurous business ideas (mushroom cultivation in prefabricated housing blocks). The common denominator was aloofness from the "sloughs" of the institutional urban renewal business and an endeavour to broach new horizons of thinking through mental or actual "breaches of the rules."
Many of the concepts "ennobled" by an award demonstrate an obsessive preoccupation with originality, many seem involuntarily cynical commentaries by excursionists affecting empathy; some give an impression of simulated or real naivety, others displayed abstruseness and whimsy. But these social and cultural experiments prompted by a surplus of unused and devalued land and buildings can also be understood as the development of "prototypes" including inevitably bizarre proposals and flops: new strategic elements for urban renewal developed not by professionals but by cultural initiatives. A medium for innovation is hence emerging in addition to the ones presented above. Certain features of some experiments have been adopted in formal practice, expanding the repertoire. In this case, too, Leipzig has played a pioneering role.
Among the elements thus taken up is the concept of interim use , introduced into professional planning through various pilot projects and now adopted by a number of local authorities.(11) Unlike in traditional urban planning, interim use is no longer interpreted as a dubious temporary solution that delays or even endangers attainment of real planning goals, and which is therefore better avoided, but as a strategic resource in urban renewal. It is closely associated with the category of the spatial pioneer who knows how to use surplus space and land for himself and others with few material resources of his own but with a lot of ideas and energy (Overmeyer 2005). In this instance, too, planning re-interprets already familiar phenomena under the prompting of cultural practice. In growing cities, too, pioneers have always played the role of urban niche user. But in urban renewal they could become key addressees for policy, raising hopes of cultural upgrading and sometimes of self-sufficient economic developments; this is all the more important in view of the housing industry bias of renewal practice in many cities. Finally, many temporary art actions have generated striking images that intimate a different aesthetic that underused and unused zones in "perforated cities" can evoke - not unlike the aestheticisation of industrial structures, which become possible only with the cessation of industrial use.
In this form, cultural practice provides substantial innovative stimulus for urban renewal, introducing the strategic factor of temporariness and instigating conceptual, organisational, and legal support for it in formal urban planning.
5. Prospects- Models and Experiments
What urban planning expertise in the renewal of shrinking cities is expected to achieve can meanwhile be outlined. Many concepts and programmes provide evidence of the enormous tasks involved. But can urban planning accomplish all this under the conditions of a slack housing market, shrinking labour markets, falling property prices, declining purchasing power and tax revenues, and decimated human resources in the public service? Under these conditions, is there any prospect of upholding planning and local policy virtues like a sense of proportion and a long-term perspective? Does this development not augur a fundamental loss of importance for urban planning? Is not the very essence of the discipline affected?
The past five years have spawned an abundance of innovative stimuli engendered by contradictory answers to these questions. Those who have no doubts about the future of urban planning rely on more or less drastic modifications to existing standard procedures within and between the agents that have always been involved (local politics and administration, state and federal government and their research and advisory institutions, the housing industry). They face a polyphony of statements, a multitude of initiatives and experiments launched by those outside the machinery of the profession proclaiming their loss of confidence in traditional practice. There are points of contact, some overlap in personnel, some mutual inspiration - but far too little of all. In the interests of their own success, these two hitherto segregated worlds need each other more urgently than either side has been willing to acknowledge. The future belongs neither to "models instead of experiments" nor the reverse: only a policy of "models and experiments "offers any perspective. The aim must be to bring together the various stimuli for innovation. There are grounds for hoping that the planned IBA Urban Redevelopment 2010 in Saxony-Anhalt will adopt this as a priority objective. Not only the stated principles of the project (IBA-Büro 2005, 134 f.) permit this conclusion.
Notes
(1) When innovation is mentioned in this article, what is meant is primarily the conceptual and methodological renewal of the urban planning discipline, not the task assigned to planning of inducing and promoting societal innovation, even though clear-cut distinctions are not possible since any "innovation-oriented planning" has to make use of new concepts and procedures if it is to be successful and must therefore necessarily renew itself, as well. See the detailed treatment of the subject of "innovation-oriented planning" in Ibert (2003). (back)
(2) Cf. Ibert (2003) on the goals, conception, and limits of exhibitions as a medium of innovation. A comparative study of the IBA Emscher Park and Expo 2000 in Hanover. (back)
(3) Exemplary for many accounts of the urban planning history of Germany on this pattern: Reinborn (1997, 175 f.). (back)
(4) This "revival" of models in spatial planning is to be explained by the "growing need for orientation" resulting from the political upheaval of 1989. Cf. detailed treatment in Becker et al. (1998, 10 ff.). (back)
(5) Despite its wide acceptance, the compact city model is far from being uncontroversial. In his book "Zwischenstadt" ("In-Between City") Sieverts (1997) has been among the most pronounced critics of the model in Germany. A recently completed, inter-disciplinary research project sponsored by the Daimler Benz Foundation on the "In-Between City" conducted by the Ladenburg Kolleg developed approaches for analysing and designing the in-between city. (back)
(6) In view of dramatic failures in government subsidisation policy in the redevelopment programme for East Germany, Werner Sewing claims that saving the historic old city centres has been the "only undisputed achievement of the 1990s"; cf. Sewing (2005, 60). (back)
(7) The competition was the kick-off for numerous initiatives organised by the federal and state governments and their research institutions to support shrinking communities in developing strategies and concepts: The "experimental housing and urban development" research field "Urban Renewal - West" of the Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning; the strategy workshop "Strong Cities - Strengthening Cities" urban redevelopment master plan of the Institute for Regional Development in the state of Brandenburg, or the consultancy services offered by the Rhineland-Palatinate Development Agency founded by the Rhineland-Palatinate economics ministry at the University of Kaiserslautern, which specialises in urban redevelopment. (back)
(8) This return to classical urban structure models as planning models for shrinking cities appears to be a German speciality. Or at least it must be said that comparable city-wide spatial approaches are not usual in English cities, which have been tackling urban regeneration for the past 20 years. (back)
(9) Cf. the case reports in the "Stadtumbau" issue of Informationen zur Raumentwicklung, Heft 10/11 (2003). (back)
(10) Presentation and discussion of the competition results in: archplus 173 (May 2005). (back)
(11) On "innovation through conversion and interim uses" and on the various current local authority approaches see Becker (2006, 11). (back)
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