Research projects

In view of the only slight decrease in land use for settlement and transport purposes in recent years, it is unlikely that the federal and state governments' land-saving targets will be achieved with the current instrumental spatial planning and urban development policy framework. Therefore, more extensive instruments for land-saving settlement development have been discussed for a long time. The coalition agreement of the North Rhine-Westphalia state government states that the reuse and conversion of existing settlement areas must have “highest priority” and that the introduction of the trade of land use certificates should be examined. Against this background, the Ministry of Economics, Industry, Climate Protection and Energy of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia commissioned the ILS gGmbH to examine how land certificate trading could be integrated into the legal regulations and to what extent the digital requirements for an effective trading regime are met. In this context, the ILS has developed a digital planning and information tool with which municipal development projects can be examined with regard to their contribution to achieving the goals of land-saving and integrated settlement development. The “NRW Flächenampel” is designed as a multi-criteria evaluation system that can be used at the level of land use and development planning. It complements the previous ex-post-oriented accounting logic of land use policy, by which the land use realized in the past is assessed at the level of municipalities, regions, federal and state levels. The “Flächenampel” has four evaluation dimensions: The location of the planning area (inside or outside the existing urban area), the type of previous use, which is assessed by the proportion of the sealed area compared to the initial state, the efficiency of use in terms of the structural utilization of the gross and net building land consumption and accessibility measured by infrastructural connections of the planning area. The evaluation results in a traffic light color, according to which the color “green” represents a good fit between the planning and land-saving goals, while the color “red” reveals serious conflicts of objectives. The “Flächenampel” is designed as an automated instrument, which means that all necessary basic information is extracted and processed from X-Planning-compatible building plans (or draft plans) as well as from publicly available geodata. The latter concerns the information required for the technical assessment of the planning projects, such as data on infrastructure or land coverage. The “Flächenampel” is also intended to provide the technical basis for a possible practice of land certificate trading.