Kick-off of BMBF project ReGerecht: Jointly Developing City and Countryside

Urban areas and the countryside are usually seen as opposites. However, often sustainable landscape development and infrastructure policies can only be realized through joint efforts. For this reason, the new project “ReGerecht – Integrative Development of a Just Balance of Interests between City, Suburbs, and Rural Areas”, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, was launched in September. The kick-off meeting was held at ZALF (Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research).

Over the course of the next five years, partners from research and practice will jointly develop solutions to decrease conflicts between city, suburbs and rural areas and to establish new ways of balancing the different interests. It will focus on the various land use demands as well as demands for resources and infrastructures linked to land use.

To do so, the project uses an approach which combines theoretical research and practice from the very beginning. Through transdisciplinary collaboration, the various actors and their perspectives are included as early as possible in the development and testing of solutions for land use conflicts. Solutions will first be developed in a regional context, specifically in the city of Schwerin and its surrounding region, and will then in a second step be transferred to other regions in Germany with cities of a similar size and facing similar challenges.

The project aims at local, regional, provincial, and federal politics, businesses and NGOs. “We are breaking new ground here because we are going for ambitious cooperative solutions which favour neither city nor countryside,” says the coordinator of the project, apl. Professor Thomas Weith (ZALF).

The project is coordinated by Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) in Müncheberg. Partners are Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Leipzig, University of Technology Dresden, Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space (IRS) in Erkner, the state capital Schwerin, Department for Regional Development and Spatial Planning Westmecklenburg, and Landgesellschaft Mecklenburg-Vorpommern mbH. In terms of content, the project is further supported by the Bundesverband der gemeinnützigen Landgesellschaften (BLG) and T-Systems Multimedia Solutions GmbH.

The five-year project “ReGerecht” is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research in the context of the funding measure “Stadt-Land-Plus” as part of the lead initiative “Zukunftsstadt” (“city of the future”). “Stadt-Land-Plus” aims at an integrated sustainable development of regions by strengthening the relationships between city and countryside.