Competence Center for Inner Development
Concept of “inner development”
The term “inner development” covers the strategic approaches and the instruments suitable for their implementation, with which an existing demand for residential and commercial areas is met by the (re)use of inner-city, already developed areas, in order to be able to avoid the use of outer areas (usually agricultural and forestry areas).
Inner development as a task of cities and municipalities
The task of inner development does not only result from the political mandate of the Federal Government from 2002 to reduce settlement area development to 30 ha/day settlement area growth by the year 2020. The municipalities are also legally obligated to give priority to urban development in inner areas (Section 1 (5) sentence 3 BauGB, Section 1a (2) BauGB). Compliance with these requirements will play an important role in the future, both in the participation of the public and the specialist authorities in the procedure for drawing up development plans and in proceedings to check the conformity of adopted development plans. In addition, successful inner development avoids structural vacancies and ensures the use of existing infrastructure, so that investments in inner development are also economically worthwhile for the municipality in the long term.
Knowledge of inner development potential
A prerequisite for successful inner development is comprehensive knowledge of the individual inner development potential of a community. This includes, in particular, brownfield sites, vacant buildings, gaps between buildings and other opportunities for redensification. Suitable instruments and methods, such as geo-information systems, support municipalities successfully and economically in identifying their potential areas, but many decision-makers are not yet aware of this everywhere.
Involvement of property owners and the public
Successful inner development is not possible without the participation of the affected property owners. This requires the development of appropriate strategies by cities and municipalities to involve property owners and the public in the process of inner development. It must be made clear that ultimately everyone, both property owners and the community, benefits from successful inner development.
Goals of the Competence Center for Inner Development
In view of the difficulty of implementing the goal of priority inner development, the Competence Center for Inner Development has set itself the task of supporting cities and municipalities in the development, introduction and implementation of such processes. To this end, the fundamentals for such processes are developed in joint research projects and the results achieved are made available to cities and municipalities in further training measures.
Dipl.-Ing. Michael Jäger
Dipl.-Ing. Thomas Müller
Dr. Lars Diederichsen - specialist lawyer for administrative law
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Hans Joachim Linke
Dipl.-Ing. Jürgen Wittig
Dipl.-Ing. Ralf Trollmann