Digital activation of area potentials
The German government’s sustainability strategy envisages halving land consumption in Germany to 30 hectares per day by 2030. However, we are still a long way from reaching this target, which was previously set at 2020: In some federal states, land consumption is currently rising again.
From the point of view of studies predicting around 1.5 million missing dwellings in metropolitan regions in the coming years due to immigration, demographic change and changing living conditions, the further sealing of areas is quite understandable – but ecologically hardly justifiable for future generations. So what do…?
In addition to the construction of climate-neutral or climate-positive settlements, the right path is the one that legislators have been prescribing since the amendment of the Building Code in 2013: Inner development before outer development. In the interior areas of our cities there are indeed large areas of land lying dormant. In a recent survey conducted by immovativ GmbH and the German Society for Internal Development (DGI), the nearly 350 participating municipalities estimate their inner-city potential for land at an average of 5.3 percent of the settlement area. This is also in line with figures determined by the DGI in a current project in the Darmstadt-Dieburg district.
As part of a project funded by the EU, gaps between buildings, vacancies and underused areas were determined in cooperation with the Office for Land Management from the intersection of cadastral, residents’ registration and consumption data. This provides municipalities with a holistic view of their potential areas and the possibility of replanning connected areas. At the same time it becomes clear that in all municipalities alone the gaps between buildings have more space than several new development areas outside. However, the project also highlights the biggest problem of inner development: around 90 percent of the land is privately owned and activation is a lengthy process for which there is a lack of human resources in the town halls.
This is where Hanauer immovativ GmbH comes in with its interior development software aREAL®: The process of interior development – from the survey of the areas to the administration to the approach to the owner and marketing – is depicted digitally and in a structured manner. Since September 2019, a pilot project has been running in the Main-Kinzig district, in which all municipalities are successively being equipped with the software solution in order to determine and activate the available areas. This year, Deutsche Telekom and Wirtschaftswoche honored the innovative software solutions of immovativ GmbH with the Digital Champions Award in the “Digital Customer Experience” category.
The managing director of immovativ GmbH, Dipl.-Ing. Bo Nintzel, will present current projects for the digital activation of space potentials as well as results from the survey on the state of inner development in Germany at the BFW Hessen/Rheinland-Pfalz/Saarland Property Development Day on 12 September 2019 and at DIKOMM on 5 November in Essen.
