Planning systems on the move? persistence and change of the German planning system

ABSTRACT

The paper addresses the relationship of planning systems and related processes of institutional change. It evaluates the persistence and change of the German planning system with a focus on recent impacts of Europeanisation. It shows that the ability to transform institutional patterns of spatial planning in Germany is rather limited. The German planning system has not undergone revolutionary shifts during the last five decades, but it is ‘by-passed’ by a new and mostly informal planning sphere recently. The latter is triggered by financial incentives bound to European structural funds and characterized by a strong focus on experimental spatial development.

KEYWORDS:

• Spatial planning
• planning systems
• Europeanisation
• territorial governance
• Germany

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the ESPON COMPASS consortium for the fruitful and collegial cooperation and the participants of the German ESPON COMPASS expert workshop for their stimulating inputs on planning practices in Germany.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The only exception is the radical transformation of spatial planning in the new Länder adapting the old Länder planning system following German unification in 1990.

2. We refer to unpublished COMPASS documents on the German planning system as follows: ‘Q1’ for Questionnaire Phase 1 and ‘Q2’ for the Questionnaire Phase 2. The number(s) after the slash indicate(s) the questions(s) we cite; ‘WS’ refers to the COMPASS expert workshop on the German Planning system (see section 1). In the list of references these documents are cited as ESPON COMPASS (2018b). The blank questionnaires are published in ESPON COMPASS (2018c).

3. At the same time, this is a turning away from a federal spatial planning policy primary aiming at the economic competitiveness of metropolitan regions (Miessner, 2020).