The official starting point of the updating process was a city workshop that took place in 2005. According to Planner 2 city workshops in Leipzig are informal meetings that allow experts of a certain field to discuss current developments in urban planning in an open debate: ’50 to 70 invited participants … in the morning are two or three presentations … to show the situation of the city, to bring in experiences from outside the city, then a panel discussion, followed by questions and in the afternoon are workgroups where some detailed issues can be discussed. At the end of the day the
results are brought together.’21 The list of participants of this workshop is attached in
Appendix 6. Results of the workshops are used in planning processes, in this case as one basis for the updating of the Centres Plan (Stadt Leipzig, 2005).
The city workshop that started the updating process had the title “Who needs a local centre?22“ and took place in June 2005. More than 60 people with different backgrounds
participated (Stadt Leipzig, 2005, see Appendix 6) but further inspection reveals that the majority of participants had an interest in retail development. No stakeholders appeared to have an explicit interest in transport or environmental topics. Only one planner from the Department of Transport Planning attended and no one from the Department of Environmental Planning. This means a deficient focus on these topics and therefore a weak level of environmental, departmental and stakeholder integration.
The topics that local spatial planners brought up on that day also reflected the focus on retail related topics. They covered a discussion of the centre development in Leipzig on the basis of the changes in the city in the previous years and the problem of discount supermarkets in non-integrated areas (Stadt Leipzig, 2005). A third topic that was discussed was named by Planner 2: ‘Article 34.4 had been added to the building law.’23
He refers to a change of the German Building Law in 2004 which followed the massive growth of discount supermarkets and which offered a stronger institutional framework for local planners.
The general agreement of participants on the problems, challenges and future developments of the centres, as presented in the report of the workshop, can be explained by the composition of participants and the chosen topics as Planner 2 explained: ‘there are less controversial discussions as there are no solutions to be found at this stage or no final ones. It is rather a communication about different views and a
21 „… ein geladener Kreis von Teilnehmern so 50 bis 70 Personen … am Vormittag gibt zwei/drei Vorträge … noch
einmal die Situation der Stadt aufreißen, auf der anderen Seite aber auch noch mal Erfahrungen von außen hereinbringen, dann eine Art Podiumsdiskussion … dann Rückfragen ins Plenum und am Nachmittag geht man in … Arbeitsgruppen, wo man Teilfragen vertieft, die dann wieder zusammengeführt werden.“ – Planner 2
22 Wer braucht schon ein Stadtteilzentrum?
common view on the situation and a basic understanding how a solution could look like. Contentious issues usually occur when it comes to discussions about details’24.
Avoiding contradictory policies is one aim of the integration approach. The development of discount retailers in non-integrated locations contradicts the Centres Plan and was therefore highly discussed in the workshop. According to the workshop report, it was urban planners and traditional retailers who especially complained about the development of car-friendly sites outside of residential areas and defined centres that usually have no link to the public transport network and are not within a walkable distance. Additionally, it was emphasised that discount retailers compete with retailers in integrated locations and small-section retailers (Stadt Leipzig, 2005).
Key drivers in urban development are financial aspects and local business tax (Rosenfeld, 2010). The type of retailer plays an important role for municipalities, for example full-range supermarkets like REWE do favour integrated locations. Furthermore, every supermarket belonging to them is a franchise and has the position of a small company and, therefore, these supermarkets pay business tax locally and not in the cities, where the company is headquartered as it is with discount retailers like Aldi and Lidl. This peculiarity of the tax system is used as one argument by local planners to strengthen traditional retailers in centres (Stadt Leipzig, 2005). However, they do not use integrated locations as another argument for franchise supermarkets, an argument that would be in the interest of environmental objectives.
In the conclusion of the day, integrated concepts were deemed ‘necessary’. This opinion is again based only on spatial issues especially in the request that facilities should be provided close to residential areas in local centres (Stadt Leipzig, 2005). However, no suggestions are written in the report on how to achieve higher degrees of integration, how integrated centres could be developed to make them accessible mainly by eco- mobility and how to reduce the car dependency that non-integrated retail locations have.
24 “also es sind weniger kontroverse Diskussionen, weil es sind ja keine Lösungsansätze an der Stelle schon oder nicht in der
Tiefe sondern es ist erst mal sozusagen Verständigung über eine Sichtweise, eine gemeinsame Sichtweise auf die Situation und eine Grundrichtung, wo so eine Lösung hingehen kann. Die Kontroversen entstehen in der Regel im Detail.“ – Planner 2