Das Stadt- und Raumlabor by Anouk Kuitenbrouwer

Spatial planning in Switzerland needs more real-life laboratories and fewer tenacious negotiations. The problems our societies need to solve are well-known, but we lack the approaches to explore new solutions. In Switzerland, spatial planning procedures are long and tedious. Because of the consensus-based approaches, experiments are virtually impossible. One alternative is to organise urban development processes as real-life laboratories in order to explore possible solutions in real-time. Such an experiment is currently taking place in the former US housing estate “Patrick Henry Village” in Heidelberg.

In the development of the so-called "Dynamic Master Plan" completed in 2019, new approaches were taken in terms of content and process. For instance, there was close cooperation between landscape architecture and experts for the environment, energy and material cycles, the "Digital City" was added as a planning expertise, and development forms in dealing with land and property were addressed by the programming experts. In an iterative process, solid foundations were laid for an urban district that is currently in the first stages of implementation. Key findings here were, for example, how the differentiation of development forms contributes to inclusiveness, how a positive overall energy balance can be achieved, how future-oriented multi-mobility can be organised at neighbourhood level and how digitalisation can help improve community services.

It should be evident that it is not always possible to achieve innovative and sustainable solutions. Especially when the legal framework lags behind and sustainability is left to the market, in many cases the economically more interesting solutions still get priority. In Switzerland, we need more space for experiments where we can examine the city from a multidisciplinary and future-oriented perspective. The knowledge is there, now we need to develop and implement it accordingly.

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