News & Events

May 4, 2007

This month, Associate Director Melanie Piana waxes poetic on her recent experience with redevelopment in Germany.

From Städtverfall to Civic Success

Last September, Robin Boyle, Chair of the Geography and Urban Planning department at Wayne State University, asked if I was interested in co-authoring a paper and presentation about the Suburbs Alliance’s Redevelopment Ready Communities program for the 2nd Annual European Conference on Managing Urban Land in Stuttgart, Germany (yes, a mouthful). Of course I was interested! It was an opportunity to travel and gain a new perspective on how our European friends plan for redevelopment.

I’ll jump at any chance to travel overseas, especially to Germany. My grandfather was a native of Stuttgart. My second cousin still lives in the family house that was one of the few standing homes after the bombs of World War II. At college, I decided to major in German and studied for eight months in Germany.

Having grown up in a small town and attended a small rural college, Germany was my introduction to urban living and independence. Here I experienced many firsts: riding the subway and regional train, living in a major urban downtown, being dependent on a bike for getting from point A to point B for daily activities.

So, it seems fitting that we told the story about the redevelopment efforts in southeast Michigan’s mature suburbs in the country that was my hands-on education about city living.

The one new German word that captured my attention during the conference was Städtverfall, which roughly translates to “parts of the city that are dying.” Large and small cities in Germany, France, Poland, Italy and many others struggle with the same issues we try to solve everyday, the same ones the Suburbs Alliance addresses through our RRC program.

Articulating sustainable development principles through regional land use planning is a key theme to regenerate the “dying cities.” More collaboration, increased stakeholder engagement and input from citizens are principles that Europe fully embraces to make redevelopment projects happen among regions and with partner countries.

Even in growth areas such as Stuttgart, local officials understand the importance of “recycling” vacant or under-utilized properties to attract new residents. Stuttgart has enormous pressures to open up new areas for settlement in farmlands, despite a plethora of available redevelopment opportunities within the city.

In every country and in almost every city of Europe, there are brownfield areas which need to be revitalized in order to preserve or improve the quality of urban living conditions. The revitalization of brownfield sites may enhance coherent urban development, but can also create new employment and stimulate the local economy. Last but not least, revitalizing brownfields for a variety of future uses preserves greenfield sites and stems the growing consumption of land.

There are a number of European organizations promoting redevelopment. REVIT, for example, strives to achieve a higher acceptance and better image for revitalized brownfield sites by testing their own models and tools on the local project areas of each partner and reporting examples of best practices to other cities and regions in Europe.

Also of interest is CABERNET, a European multi-stakeholder expert network that is working to enhance the rehabilitation of brownfield sites within the context of sustainable development of European cities. CABERNET explores new management strategies and innovative tools and stimulates coordinated research activities.

I encourage you to visit the REVIT and CABERNET websites to learn more about Europe’s tools and techniques for promoting redevelopment. We can learn from them, as they learned from us about how we encourage redevelopment through the RRC program.

While the redevelopment challenges facing our region are uniquely distinct from those European cities are grappling with, there is much to glean from their approach to redevelopment. They have had many successes that can inform our own strategies, and we should take their lessons to heart. In our rapidly evolving world economy, redevelopment will play a vital role in creating leading cities and an economically prosperous, environmentally sustainable and socially equitable southeast Michigan.