RessStadtQuartier 2

Urban planning is increasingly presenting itself as planning at the neighborhood level: here, overall planning and technological concepts and economic economies of scale can be realized. Identification effects of the residents can accelerate the implementation of measures. At the same time, urban neighborhoods in metropolitan areas are now subject to a variety of pressures to change due to immigration and the increasing attractiveness of living in the city, but also due to social and economic change processes, e.g., the return of (small) companies based on Industry 4.0 to city centers. Overall, an increasing dynamic of the restructuring of neighborhoods can be observed. The development of planning tools for the neighborhood level therefore has a very high value for transferable solution models.

Urban neighborhoods bundle material flows in different ways: The stock of the "built environment" of quarters (buildings and infrastructures) represents a stockpile of materials that are released during redevelopment, reconstruction, demolition or conversion and should be returned to high-quality recycling cycles as secondary raw materials. The functions of neighborhoods for residential, commercial, or specific purposes (e.g., university campuses) control material and substance flows in the form of the demand of material flows flowing in for supply (for example, energy supply) and the release of materials to be disposed of. At the same time, the functions of a neighborhood are decisive for the build-up of new stocks of materials in the construction of new buildings and infrastructures. The described increasing dynamics of neighborhood planning is therefore an opportunity for the establishment of an urban material flow management, which so far only takes place sectorally (e.g. in the energy sector) and rather reactively (e.g. recycling concept in case of demolition). The current obstacles for a neighborhood-based material flow management are partly due to the lack of awareness for the possibilities of planning processes to influence resource efficiency, but partly also due to the lack of information bases and instruments for a comprehensive assessment of the aspects of resource efficiency on the neighborhood level.

Against this background, the project pursues the goals of establishing in practice the knowledge and information bases developed in the research and development phase, as well as practice-related instruments for neighborhood-based material flow management, testing them in the context of real planning processes, and further developing them according to application needs. The developed "resource efficiency toolbox" is to be used in various fields of application in real planning processes and thus systematically increase the resource efficiency of urban quarters.

The direct utilization of the project results takes place on the one hand in the participating city of Darmstadt and the associated partner cities Wiesbaden, Bensheim, municipality Münster (Hessen) and municipality Otzberg, as well as real estate companies. On the one hand, this includes the stabilization of planning processes and the development of guiding principles for a "resource-efficient urban quarter", which are intended by the cities. On the other hand, the findings on resource efficiency will be brought into widespread use in the form of a business model to be developed and made accessible to other potential users such as municipalities, real estate companies, etc.

The innovation potential and novelty of the "Resource Efficiency Toolbox" developed in RessStadtQuartier lies in particular in the linking of approaches of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Building Information Modeling (BIM) and GIS-based cadastres. This is done conceptually by interweaving the "physical life cycle" with the "planning cycle" of neighborhoods. The "physical life cycle" underlies the method of LCA and encompasses the manufacturing phase, i.e., the construction of the neighborhood including the production of building materials and raw materials, the utility phase, during which the neighborhood is inhabited, and the end-of-life phase, which includes demolition/deconstruction and subsequent disposal. By capturing the full life cycle, it becomes possible to evaluate "gray energy" and circular economy measures, among other things. Based on the "planning cycle" of neighborhoods from construction planning to realization of measures, the tasks or decision points can be identified with which actors can influence the "physical life cycle" of neighborhoods. The "toolbox" developed in RessStadtQuartier is tailored to these tasks and can thus provide optimal decision support in the holistic view of the life cycle. In detail, the contributions to the impact goals of the announcement are as follows.