REFINA—An Integrated and Multilevel Approach to Dealing with Land Consumption?

Abstract

In Germany, land consumption for settlement and transport development amounts to 100 ha/day, thus significantly exceeding the goal set by Germany's sustainability strategy, which aims at reducing the rate of the expansion of built-up areas to 30 ha/day by the year 2020. Increased orientation of local authorities and stakeholders towards the promotion of economic competitiveness, complex interrelations between actors involved in planning, substantial planning autonomy of Germany's local administrative units, as well as stronger democratic norms in planning, render a traditional linear planning scheme obsolete. The federal administration and publicly funded research institutions therefore opted for a non-legislative approach aiming at the production of a body of methodologies, which would engage participation processes and deliberative decision-making. The name being a German acronym for “Research for the Reduction of Land Consumption and for Sustainable Land Management”, this collaborative national programme gathered a number of planning actors who have framed the complex topic of sustainable land use into a series of manageable, fundable and adjustable projects which take into account multiple spatial and time scales. This paper emphasizes the elements found within REFINA which lead the way towards a strategic communication-based, integrated and multilevel approach to dealing with land consumption.