Metropolitan Development Concepts and Planning Policies in West Germany

Abstract

Today nearly half West Germany's population lives in 24 very large urban agglomerations. The twentieth century growth of these metropolitan areas has not just been an increase in population and size. It has involved the development of new social and economic structures, new sets of spatial relationships and new physical arrangements and configurations. It has required new technical and administrative definitions to be made and new understandings to be attempted. Old concepts of urban development and planning have had to be put aside and new ones formulated. The many new planning concepts formulated in the 1950s and early 1960s for the physical structural development of the large agglomerations were summarised and related to each other in an idealised form by Rudolf Hillebrecht. Although his diagram for the development of a metropolitan area (1962), and the reasoning lying behind it, represents only a model of metropolitan planning policies and development, it is nonetheless useful as a benchmark of the aims and objectives of generally informed West German planning opinion in the 1950s and 1960s. Many of the concepts included by Hillebrecht in his model were also incorporated in plans which sought to guide and help shape the emerging metropolitan areas. In this sense, in examining the concepts and planning policies for the development of the West German metropolitan areas, the Hillebrecht model can be used as a helpful reference point. This article first examines the national pattern of metropolitan development, and draws the distinction between the two great metropolitan regions the Rhine-Ruhr and the Rhine-Main-Neckar and the sixteen monocentric metropolitan areas. The second main section then considers the nature and extent of changes in metropolitan structure in West Germany in this century and the changes there have been in planning theory and planning policy. This section contains a brief introduction to Hillebrecht's model, whose main elements residential areas and population distribution, central places, industrial areas, open spaces, and transport networks are then considered more specifically. These main concepts are examined in the next main section of the article in relation to the planning concepts and policies and the development experience of the Munich, Hamburg and Hanover metropolitan areas. This is followed by a brief summary of present metropolitan physical planning problems in West Germany. The concluding section discusses some recent changes in the national context for metropolitan planning and some perspectives for the future, suggesting that the concepts of the 1950s and 1960s need reformulating to meet the very different requirements of an appropriate environment for contemporary society.