It’s especially when you’re decluttering that you realize how absurd our relationship with things has become. There’s a table that could last for decades, but you don’t want to use it yourself, and no one else wants to take it off your hands—not even for free. A lamp works; a stroller rolls. Yet they’ve become a burden. Too good to throw away as bulky trash. Too worthless to resell. The simple solution: toss them into the “giveaway box” outside the front door. Problem solved, conscience cleared. This practice has become so popular in recent decades that Berlin will impose new fines for the “illegal disposal of trash” in the summer of 2025.
The City as a Storage Space
One thing is certain: value doesn’t disappear just because an object is broken. Value disappears because our system has no patience for things. This logic also shapes how we deal with buildings and construction materials. According to the Federal Environment Agency, Germany produced approximately 198.8 million metric tons of construction and demolition waste in 2023. Meanwhile, Europe talks about raw material security and climate goals. We must come to terms with this paradox: We search for materials on the other side of the world while overlooking what has long been right at our feet.
Urban mining addresses this contradiction. The term evokes images of toolboxes and dust. Yet it demands more than just better sorting facilities. It forces us to view the city as a storehouse before the excavator creates new realities. We believe this perspective is the right one. Anyone who takes existing structures seriously as a reservoir of raw materials can no longer treat demolition as a mere starting point.
This issue of G+L shows how this translates into concrete terms in urban planning and landscape architecture. In Heidelberg, the Patrick-Henry Village brings the question to the scale of an entire neighborhood. Grellgasse 3 in Vienna demonstrates that reuse requires design—and isn’t merely a matter of good intentions. And in a conversation with Dirk Hebel from KIT, we discuss the limits of urban mining, as well as what Germany can learn from Ethiopia.
Green Consolation Prize
And that is urgently needed. The Circularity Gap Report 2025 estimates that secondary materials account for 6.9 percent of the global economy. We are still a long way from a circular economy. The same old approach dominates; only the vocabulary sounds better. In the Global Resources Outlook 2024, UNEP warns of a continued rise in raw material consumption. So we can keep pretending that technology and morality will somehow solve this. Or we can finally ask why buying new is so often easier, cheaper, and legally safer than reusing. Urban mining will only be taken seriously when it’s no longer just a green consolation prize for demolition. The best raw material is still the one we don’t have to extract in the first place.
IBA Basel Specialist publication from the G+L editorial team
With the end of IBA Basel Expo at the beginning of June 2021, the International Building Exhibition Basel 2020 officially came to an end and with it the first effective International Building Exhibition in the border triangle between Germany, France and Switzerland. Everything you need to know about IBA Basel can be found here.
With the end of the IBA Basel Expo at the beginning of June 2021, the International Building Exhibition Basel 2020 officially came to an end and with it what was effectively the first International Building Exhibition in the border triangle between Germany, France and Switzerland. A closing film now summarizes the goals and developments of IBA Basel 2020.
The IBA Basel was the first International Building Exhibition to address the topic of spatial planning in border regions. International Building Exhibitions are a special format for urban and regional development. They are a hallmark of national building and planning culture. For more than a century, these experimental fields have brought current issues of planning and building to the forefront of national and international debate.
The origins of the IBA Basel date back to 2008, when everything began with the so-called first “draft memorandum”. This was drawn up by the Department of Construction and Transport of the Canton of Basel-Stadt together with the Trinational Eurodistict Basel TEB. In 2009, the TEB worked out the challenges and opportunities of trinational fragmentation and published these in the 2020 development strategy “A Future for Three”. In the strategy, it identified the main spatial planning objectives of “settlement development”, “transport development” and “landscape planning” as well as the “interactions with the areas of economic and population development” and “governance” and “financing of major metropolitan projects”. In 2010, the political players in the region jointly proclaimed the Basel International Building Exhibition.
2020: 20 projects with the IBA Basel label
In the ten years that followed, the IBA Basel put the shared responsibility for the agglomeration into concrete terms in projects, buildings, infrastructure and landscapes and provided impetus for a cross-border culture of cooperation, in line with the official IBA motto “Au-delà des frontières, ensemble – Growing together across borders”. Under the direction of Monica Linder-Guarnaccia, the IBA in the border triangle saw itself as an instrument of change. From 130 project proposals, the IBA team and a large number of stakeholders from the administration and interest groups launched 43 cross-border projects. A total of 20 of these were officially labeled as IBA projects in 2020.
To the memorandum of the IBA Basel
The memorandum of the IBA Expert Council describes the basis for implementing an IBA in ten recommendations. Precisely because the IBAs have no fixed regulations, their significance for building culture and urban development in a regional, national and international context must be constantly reviewed.
About the IBA Expert Council
The IBA Expert Council supports and advises the current IBAs and ensures that the developments, structures and content of the IBAs are in line with the quality criteria set out in the Memorandum. It also accompanies the preparatory phases of the IBA initiatives. The IBA Expert Council was appointed by the Federal Ministry of Building. Read more about the Expert Council here.
The initial situation of the International Building Exhibition Basel was that of a fragmented agglomeration. The central IBA task was to harmonize the different submission rights, legal bases, internal administrative processes, decision-making powers and financing models of the three participating countries and, last but not least, to build up intercultural competence. This was no easy task and without an understanding of the different mentalities and hierarchies, the implementation of real cross-border projects on an equal footing with the other party would not have been possible. In the course of the IBA in the border triangle, a paradigm shift took place in cross-border cooperation between German, French and Swiss stakeholders. The border region grew together on a political, economic and cultural level during the IBA years.
A budget of twelve million euros instead of one billion
Getting there was an adventure and many a stone had to be cleared away. The IBA in the three countries had to work with the different cultural influences of the three countries, the economic discrepancy between the flourishing economic metropolis of Basel and the agglomeration and the bilingualism – German and French. Above all, however, financing was a constant problem. Despite the support of 27 financing municipalities, the available budget remained far underfunded. The IBA Basel worked with twelve million, while the IBA Hamburg received one billion euros.
The planned three-year financing of the IBA Basel office and its project development fund placed additional demands on the ten-year project throughout its entire duration. This also became part of a recurring search for consensus, added value and return on investment.
The IBA in the border triangle is not an architectural showcase in the traditional sense and has therefore been criticized several times in the past. According to critics, the lighthouse projects traditionally built for an IBA are missing. And yes, the International Building Exhibition Basel is not characterized by building construction projects. Rather, it defines a new era for the format of the International Building Exhibition itself. The background: unlike its predecessors – such as the IBA Stadtumbau in Saxony-Anhalt, the IBA See in Lusatia or the IBA Emscher Park – the Basel International Building Exhibition is not taking place in a traditionally structurally weak area.
The IBA of processes
The Basel region has been flourishing for decades with financially strong companies such as Novartis and Roche. The IBA in the border triangle did not arise out of an emergency situation. The challenge of the International Building Exhibition Basel was to establish a tri-national planning culture between more than 64 regional authorities and numerous private stakeholders over ten IBA years and to launch outstanding cross-border projects in a rolling process. The International Building Exhibition Basel is therefore an IBA of processes. This difference has not made it easy for it. In contrast to building construction projects, process innovation is difficult to present.
Out of 130, 20 projects prevailed
An International Building Exhibition puts social, future living environments up for discussion. It must have a message and this must be significant for other regions, it must be transferable. The International Building Exhibition Basel has shown internationally how measures to strengthen and develop a border region can be implemented together. The Basel International Building Exhibition shows how beneficial it is to take the needs of the other party into account. It has shown how participation and an interdisciplinary approach can increase project quality, even if they take more time and are more complex. The 20 labeled IBA projects together with the IBA project groups and the nominated projects speak for themselves.
IBA Basel closing film
The finissage on June 4, 2021 marked the official end of the IBA Basel Expo and with it the International Building Exhibition Basel. Together with the IBA Presidium, IBA Basel Managing Director Monica Linder-Guarnaccia invited guests to reflect on the findings of ten years of the IBA process and look ahead to the future development of the region.
Spatial planning development across national borders was the focus of the International Building Exhibition Basel. No IBA before the IBA Basel had ever dealt with this topic in this way. The special focus, objectives and developments of the IBA Basel are now summarized in a closing film for the IBA Basel 2020.
Garten + Landschaft provided information online about the projects, their creators and the IBA’s goals. The findings of the first cross-border International Building Exhibition in the border triangle of Germany, France and Switzerland have resulted in the publication “IBA Basel 2020. Crossing borders together” in German and French, which is well worth reading. Find out more here.
At Lake Seljord in the Norwegian province of Telemark, home to a sea monster called Selma, landscape architects and architects planned a “sea snake tower” as part of the “Seljord and its legends” project.
Building in a picturesque landscape is a delightful task. The planners set the scene, the landscape accentuates small buildings. On October 18, a new observation tower, the “Sea Snake Tower”, was opened on Lake Seljord in Norway. It is part of the Skiensvassdraget river system and the culmination of a series of landscape-based interventions placed around the lake as part of the “Seljord and its Legends” project by Feste Landscape Architects, Rintala Eggertson Architects and Springer Kulturstudio, all from Norway. The 15-meter-high tower opens up to the surrounding landscape at different heights. Viewing platforms on the various levels offer views of the landscape. The municipality of Seljord has just under 3,000 inhabitants and is located in the Norwegian province of Telemark. A sea monster called Selma is said to have been sighted for the first time in Seljordsvatn, a lake that lies partly within the municipality, as early as 1750. This is why the coat of arms of Seljord, developed in 1989, shows a yellow sea serpent on a red background. The creature in Lake Seljord is said to be between four and 50 meters long, have a horse or crocodile-like head and appear pitch black. There is also talk of a pair of front fins and humps. The projects of “Seljord and its legends” are documented in Topos 74.Buildings in special places are also the theme of the November issue of Garten + Landschaft. The magazine presents a selection of successful buildings as well as viewing platforms, towers, footbridges and bridges.
