COVID-19 affected Germany severely. Public life came to a standstill from early March on, with dramatic consequences for personal lives and for the economy. The authorities, both Federal and Länder, reacted with previously unheard of measures to provide instant relief, spending unprecedented sums of money resulting in public debts of inconceivable magnitude.

The ultimate effects of all this are unknown, but they will be dramatic. It is already obvious that the effects will be unbalanced. For example, there is state aid for the automobile industry and the Lufthansa airline, but, for example, restaurants and cinemas are forced into insolvency; theatres, opera houses and symphony orchestras cannot perform.

The Regionalverband shifted to working from home, with a ban on travelling and hosting face-to-face meetings. Luckily, much of our ROBUST activity is happening online and by e-mail anyway. We were able to carry on with our collaborative work, both as a Living Lab and within the COP, mainly because much of the work within the current period isn’t necessarily face-to-face. 

On the Regionalverband’s side, we are working with our external experts on their specialised input to answer our ecosystem services research questions specifically within the context of German legal structures of formal spatial planning. This is an iterative process of mutual refining; for example, the Regionalverband developed a method to enrich the somewhat stereotypical urban-rural notion by proposing the “Outer Space-Inner Space” approach (Refining a basic concept: The Outer-Inner-Space notion as a specification of the Rural-Urban dualism). However, we had to replace the interim meetings with our external experts with phone calls and e-mail exchanges. 

Our research partner, PRAC, turned the crisis into an opportunity, as far as this is possible, by doing research on the capacity of regions for shifting to working from home, and the effects on air quality. (Effects of the Covid-19 pandemic in the area of tension between the economy and climate change: A case study at rural and city district level in Southern Germany)

What we missed, however, was the Informed Cities Forum and assembly in Lucca, and the possibility to host regional workshops. It is not realistic to simply postpone workshops and meetings. We did produce knowledge and are producing knowledge without them, and this is working out well. Instead of holding workshops for the sake of holding them, we will conceive and apply other sharing and dissemination formats, as appropriate. For example, in the coming weeks we will interpret and partly translate the research results from our external experts, to share with the ROBUST community.

We must also account for shifts in priorities. Municipalities will be under extreme pressure; regions, states and the EU will launch recovery strategies that aren’t necessarily in line with what ROBUST set out to research when we conceived the project almost five years ago. And who knows whether there will be a new COVID-19 outbreak in the fall? Will face-to-face events be possible within the lifetime of ROBUST at all?

There is no point in waiting. We will continue working to our best professional ability.

Put simply, we are trying to assess the limits to growth in the Frankfurt/Rhein-Main Region.

To this end, we have defined Außenbereich (“Outer Space”) and Innenbereich (“Inner Space”), a dichotomy rooted in the German planning laws: There is the built-up area (Inner Space), and the rest. Development – or land take – is consuming parts of this rest, the Outer Space.

The Outer Space is providing ecosystem services, and land take will reduce these services. Demand for ecosystem services is induced by the activies in the Inner Space. After all, we will make up the balance of supply and demand.

In the Envisioning phase we operationalised this. There is a need to reduce complexities and to make assumptions by aggregating regional GIS data, because our database goes into details we do not need to get the picture we want. This process used Baugesetzbuch (Federal Building Law) categories as a guideline.

Outer Space is an aggregation of green areas. It includes priority areas for agriculture and agro land management, forests, ecologically-significant areas, lakes, rivers and priority areas for the extraction of near-surface deposits.

Inner Space consists of residential / mixed / commercials building areas, areas for common use, special building areas, rail, road and air transport, utilities, waste management and sewerage areas.

(It should be noted that both areas in use and areas designed for these uses are covered. Open space within the Inner Space is not regarded as contributing to ecosystem services in this research.)

The Process

During the development scenario analytical process, we first tried buffers around the Inner Space areas. Although this was technically viable, we developed a more sophisticated scheme that took a political policy guideline into account: Future development should be concentrated around railway stations.

Technically, this calculation starts with circles around stations. However, numerous restrictions apply and particular areas must be removed from the calculation, including: Natura 2000 sites, nature reserves, (floodplain) landscape conservation areas, natural monuments, protected landscape components, legally effective compensation areas, legally protected biotopes, flood areas, water protection zones 1 and 2, mineral spring protection areas A and B, protected forest, the Roman Limes (a UNESCO World Heritage designation), 1,000 m buffer around wind farms, safety distances around Seveso III utilities, 400 m buffer around high voltage lines, new delimitation of settlement restriction area, and, last but not least, plus forest and the Frankfurt Green Belt (note: Mind that this Green Belt is inside Frankfurt, unlike London’s Green Belt.).

In short, these restrictions substantially reduce the circular development areas around railway stations.

2030 and post-2030 development scenarios for the Frankfurt/Rhein-Main Region

We applied the Systematic Evidence Review. However, we didn’t restrict our approach to just that, but assessed our needs against our resources and designed a specific database and research agenda. We engaged with our internal Regionalverband GIS and ecosystem services experts. Later, we presented our findings to our scientific partners, who are now investigating whether they can provide additional data, information and knowledge.

We now have a set of maps (with the necessary detailed background information) that represent both our Inner Space and our Outer Space, with two ‘development’ scenarios.

That is: assumptions about land take to be made possible through the on-going Regional Land Use Planning process. Accordingly, this is very much in line with what we described in our first Live Case post.

To be continued…