Energy Efficiency and Integrated Urban Development – The Brandenburg Case
The comprehensive document describes and analyses the experience in developing an integrated approach to urban development and housing over the last two decades.
The regional structure of Brandenburg, a federal state of app. 2.5 million inhabitants, is characterized by a small number of larger cities and many small towns. While the population in the metropolitan region around Berlin is growing, it is drastically shrinking in the peripheral regions due to migration and demographic change. The urban structures are characterized by many older urban cores, housing estates from the state-socialist period and a considerably sprawl of older and new housing around the towns.
The report documents the development after the political turn and German unification, which was during the early 1990s dominated by ad-hoc measures to improve the housing and infrastructural malaise of the post war to 1990 period. Energy and water efficiency were not so much a problem of climate protection, but an issue of keeping housing affordable under market condition. New homes were built that served quality demands and the run down inner cities as well as the panel estates saw a first round of rehabilitation.
During a second phase, urban and regional policies were established under the impact of spatial polarization between the metropolitan space and shrinking peripheral regions. With regards to energy efficiency, this meant understanding the interdependence between socio-economic development and demand and the need to qualify methods so that towns could become more sustainable entities. Only since 2006, more than 15 years after the political turning point, the third phase of a deliberately integrated policy started with the master-plan for Urban Regeneration. To introduce its tools, like the Integrated Urban Development Concepts (INSEK), new forms of governance had to be established between public and private actors to work towards the joint goal of an active development, which is at the same time sensitive to the human and natural environment.
The report follows these developments in detail and provides material about a number of case studies about a climate aware urban change and the respective building projects. How to design a city-vision process is described as well as cases of the conversion of older building to make them meet the demands of a changing society and at the same time to reduce the CO2 footprint of municipalities. Not only success stories are described, but also the pitfalls that were encountered on the way.
The report is available here.