The Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning

Research Project: Practicability check ‒ development orders

Project briefing

  • Status Completed
  • Project duration January 2020 – December 2021
  • Programme ExWoSt

Inner-city gap sites, waste land or other under-used land offer great potential for housing construction, which is desperately needed in many towns, cities and municipalities. However, this land is often left unused. The development order under Section 176 BauGB can help change this situation. Therefore, the research project focused on the central question of how the development order could be used more frequently and efficiently to promote housing construction.

Background

Repositioning or rather correctly adjusting municipal land policy is currently one of the biggest challenges facing urban development. It particularly concerns the creation of housing. At the same time, the frequently present internal development potential is to be consistently used for the purpose of priority internal development by building in gaps, activating waste land, infill building and rezoning.

For many reasons, it is difficult to mobilise this potential. Causes for the lack of development include: the stockpiling of private land, speculative land sales, the reluctance of owners to develop the land and the resistance on the part of the neighbours and local residents.

On the other hand, there is a series of approaches and instruments, which are based on the activation of unused development rights for gap sites or waste land. However, for the reasons stated, they have only been partially successful in achieving this objective. Where a municipality has used the land register of gap sites to find land that could be mobilised for development, there is often a lack of the required “sticking power” or a viable set of instruments.

Although the development order under Section 176 BauGB is in principal applicable in these cases and can be used to give incentives for cooperation on the part of the owners, due to the intensity of the intervention, it is tied to particular conditions. In order to meet these conditions, the deployment of the development order is associated with considerable effort and expense. This is particularly true if, as is generally the case, the instrument has not been deployed before and the administration needs to acquire new knowledge.. However, that is not only down to the strict conditions of the development order, but also due to the occasionally reluctance of municipal politicians to use instruments of intervention, such as the development order.

Objective

The research project has investigated the legal and practical reasons for the described reluctance in the deployment of the development order under Section 176 BauGB. It studied the question as to how the development order can make a significant contribution to internal development, and in particular to the creation of housing. The options for an increased deployment of the development order were also sounded out. In doing so, studies particularly investigated the kinds of properties and characteristics that are suitable for a broader deployment of development orders in practice. The development of ideal types in this regard was used to analyse which scenarios were feasible and ought to be used.

These questions were answered in an intensive dialogue with nine selected municipalities, which are considering the increased deployment of the development order or are already progressing in that direction. They participated intensively in the framework of a practicability check.

In conclusion, recommendations were drafted for a practical and legal approach to increasing the quantity and quality of development order deployment in practice. At its core were findings regarding the legal conditions of the development order, procedures and processes, and the interaction with other instruments, both formal and informal, such as development concepts and urban development contracts.

Contractor for the research project was the Deutsches Institut für Urbanistik gGmbH (German Institute of Urban Affairs), Berlin.

Contact us

  • Mathias Metzmacher
    Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development
    Division WB 8 "Housing and Society"
    Phone: +49 228 99401-2620
    Fax: +49 228 9910 401-2620
    Email: mathias.metzmacher@bbr.bund.de

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