Abstract

Urbanisation, sprawl, urban sprawl, landscape consumption - these are the negative buzzwords of the continuing growth of urban agglomerations. Are the areas beyond the metropolises inevitably losers in this global process? How can regions between the big cities creatively deal with the changed framework conditions? The authors address this question using the example of the trinational Lake Constance area - a region within the so-called "growth banana" between London, Paris and Milan and at the same time in the area of tension between the cities of Stuttgart, Munich and Zurich. Based on theoretical concepts, such as the net city, this search for strategies starts at several spatial scales and includes arguments about settlement and transport infrastructures, planning instruments and the organisation of innovation. The publication summarises the results of two research projects of the University of Applied Sciences Constance on this topic, which were also reflected in the urban planning part of the feasibility study for the IGA 2017 at Lake Constance. The descriptions are supplemented by external contributions to the discourse, among others by urban and traffic sociologists, architectural historians and landscape architects, as well as by numerous interviews, among others with Winy Maas (MVRDV), Saskia Sassen and Richard Sennett, Franz Oswald, Hans Georg Gadamer and Atelier 5.