Urban-Regional Trialogue on Regional Land Use Management

Spatial sciences agree that ground and soil are scarce, not renewable resources and not interchangeable economic goods. The use of land has to meet a wide range of usually contradictory demands. There is hardly any scope of action where the complexity of ecological, economic and social demands are so highly conspicuous as when dealing with finite resources and at the same time meeting the necessary requirements for settlement areas. Different kind of actors with their various conceivabilities is requesting soil in a certain location for their own needs. The economical and considerate use of resources, especially of not renewable ones, is one of the fundamental principles of sustainable action. In Germany the area used for settlement and transportation infrastructure build after World War II is of the same amount than in all centuries before. In the period of 2002-2005 this “consumption of land ” is 114 hectares per day. It is a social and political concern that this unabated high consumption of land, as it occurred now, is impossible in the long run and that we have to find new ways to deal with the areas for settlement and transportation infrastructure. Doing this we have to deal with a whole bundle of multi-actor and multi-level problems relevant to spatial planning. The used planning approaches and the existing balance of power between cities, regions, local stakeholders and interest groups seem to be inadequate to face the problem of sustainable land use