Urban Resource Management: Instruments for the resource efficient development of city quarters („RessStadtQuartier“)

Additionally, the “built-up environment” of neighbourhoods (buildings and infrastructure) constitutes an inventory of resources which free up during restoration, renovation or demolition, and should be used as raw materials in high-quality recovery cycles. The accelerated dynamic of neighbourhood planning is thus a chance for the establishment of an urban resource management, which has only taken place on the sector-level (e.g. in the energy sector) and in a reactional manner (e.g. recycling concept for a demolition) thus far.

Present obstacles to neighbourhood-level resource management are partially a lack of awareness for the possibilities of planning processes to influence resource efficiency but also insufficient information fundamentals and instruments for the comprehensive assessment of aspects of resource efficiency on the neighbourhood level. Given this background, the project aims to develop the goals, knowledge- and information fundamentals as well as practical instruments for a neighbourhood-level resource management and test them within actual planning processes.

The project develops methods and instruments as a “toolbox for resource efficiency” for the knowledge-based management in communal planning processes. This includes conceptional fundamentals, their implementation in IT-based instruments for practical uses and the analysis of framework conditions for the successful implementation in planning processes. The actual neighbourhood planning of the communal partners Darmstadt and Wiesbaden provide the specifications for scientific studies and the environment for testing the “toolbox”.

Further information on the project results can be found here (opens in new tab) .

If you are interested in using the developed tools in practice, please use our contact form (opens in new tab) .