- Municipal Guidelines for Low-Carbon Urban Planning and Design in Germany – An investigation into Scopes, Strategies and International Transferability   click here to open paper content662 kb
by    Seelig, Sebastian | seelig@youngcities.org   click here to send an email to the auther(s) of this paper
Short Outline
The paper investigates German municipal guidelines on low-carbon urban development exploring their scales of intervention, the addressed fields, strategies and measures under the question of transferability to other parts of the world.
Abstract
Climate change and adequate reactions by mitigation and adaptation are high on the political agenda of German municipalities. Over the last ten years, a number of larger cities, such as Bielefeld, Hamburg, or Stuttgart, but also smaller communities, such as Seelze or Rottweil, developed and implemented local climate protection policies. Apart from these tangible urban policies, just over the last three years, a number municipalities, such as Augsburg, Bremen, and Essen, and federal states, like Bavaria and North Rhine-Westphalia, have elaborated more abstract urban design and planning guidelines aiming at climate protection on city and neighbourhood level. These guidelines (or manuals) transfer experiences of climate protection in urban development into design and planning instructions for local administrations, planners, architects, and developers. The innovative quality of these guidelines is their interdisciplinary approach: These documents combine local climate change analyses and forecasts with strategies for energy-efficient urban planning, urban design, and architecture combined with energy management and transport strategies. Most of the guidelines also include instructions on the integration of the proposed activities into legal planning frameworks, such as detailed or local plans.
Taking into account the long and successful experiences of German municipalities in sustainable urban development, these guidelines might also provide adequate answers for developing energy-efficient neighbourhoods and cities in other parts of the world. In order to explore potentials and constraints of these guidelines, the paper analyzes manuals from German municipalities, esp. Augsburg, Essen and Bremen, in detail and investigates their scales of intervention, the addressed fields, strategies and measures of mitigation of climate change. It will also discuss the integration of the proposed measures into the legal planning framework. Special attention is paid to the question if these manuals and (parts of) their approaches are suitable to be transferred to other urban situations, esp. in emerging markets. Thus, the role of the political, climatic and economic contexts in these guidelines is also addressed.


Keywords
Climate change, mitigation, local guidelines, energy-efficiency
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