Concept Residential Areas

Money talks – this sober principle still dominates the planning of residential areas today. Many municipalities find it difficult to resist investor-driven urban development. But local residents have become more demanding. It’s is a well-known fact that a lively urban quarter needs more than just affordable housing, ample parking spaces and a functioning traffic infrastructure. Yet it is much more difficult to translate this insight into actual planning.

Andreas Hofer, Director of the International BuildingExhibition 2027 in Stuttgart and co-initiator of several housing cooperatives in Zurich, has a lot of experience in doing so. In his essay, he describes the laborious farewell to 100 years of housing developments and the renaissance of the urban quarter – “this dense and loud mess hated by modernity”. For him, this paradigm shift is best achieved where there are links to existing building structures, for example in former industrial areas.

In this issue, we take an in-depth look at two current neighbourhood developments. Prinz Eugen Park in Munich and Erlenmatt Ost in Basel are pursuing ambitious goals in terms of resource conservation, mixed use and social integration. The guidelines on which their planning is based are accordingly detailed. Of equal importance are clients who are open to experimentation and intensive cooperation between all stakeholders during the planning process and beyond.

We also take a look beyond Europe’s borders. In the Reports section of this issue, Florian Busch describes the forces at work behind the apparent chaos of Tokyo’s urban planning and the challenges facing Japan’s capital city with its pending population decline.