It’s not just in our September 2023 issue that we make space for student projects. Students also present their own work here on our website. You can find all the projects on our “Studies” topic page – and the September issue is available in our store.
We are Mühldorf – but who is actually meant by “we”? The following spatial development strategy for Mühldorf am Inn focuses in particular on establishing a community discourse. This should be started right at the beginning of the project and take the form of a steering group.
The project proceeded as follows: Initially, a comprehensive spatial analysis in the form of a SWOT map was developed to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the city of Mühldorf. The results of the trend analysis directed the focus to the overarching topic of a sustainable policy concept, which concentrates on the topics of mobility, the labor market and land use. Mobility, the labor market and land use are current issues in the development of cities, but above all in the transformation of places in rural areas. For future developments, there must be an active response to the location in order to continue to guarantee attractive locations. A future-oriented vision with a time horizon of 2053 was developed for the Bavarian town of Mühldorf am Inn with the help of the strong interrelationship between the above-mentioned topics.
The analysis of the three main topics, mobility, labor market and land use, resulted in a package of measures with 12 interventions that are important and feasible for the city of Mühldorf. The measures are categorized according to the three main themes of mobility, labour market and land use, but are conceived in an integrated manner and overlap in all respects to enable efficient implementation.
Everyone is needed! In order to create active change in the city, all stakeholders must be brought on board. This has led to the development of a strategy and guidelines on how dynamic cooperation can work and how stakeholders far beyond the city council can be reached. A newly established steering group, which fills two new positions in the city administration, namely the “citizen caretaker” and “business caretaker”, brings current topics to the table alongside the process coach and the city architect. On the basis of these results, urban planning can respond to the needs of stakeholders in Mühldorf and thus provide policy-makers with directional support when making decisions. Implementation takes place in small steps. At the beginning, small interventions are implemented, such as a pop-up cycle path or the provision of areas for free use, in order to raise awareness among citizens for the activation and reuse of the areas. Initial interventions are evaluated repeatedly at intervals in order to ensure that the structural implementation is continuously adapted.
The “Big Plan” provides a spatial overview of the long-term development goals. This shows the overarching goals of the main topics. Mühldorf wants to offer a multimodal transport system in the area of mobility and thus position itself as a showcase project for the transport transition in the region. Car-free neighborhoods, a city-region streetcar and mobility hubs with sustainable means of transport are measures in this regard. In order to continue to make the labor market attractive for all generations, Mühldorf wants to focus on the topic of “work of tomorrow” and create new living space with innovative and shared workplaces. Mühldorf also wants to use the finite resource of land efficiently and sparingly and contribute to compact urban development for a liveable city with surrounding areas. To this end, inner-city redensification is important as well as defining clear settlement boundaries and natural and open spaces in order to prevent further land consumption.
In order to concretize the project and show the positive effects on specific districts, there are three so-called “zoom-ins”. Here, three different districts were examined in more detail and realistic future effects were presented in axonometries. The zoom-in area at the train station was selected to turn the station into a new hub for sustainable mobility and to exploit the potential for densification south of the tracks. The external site of Rosenheim Technical University is located to the north-east of the station. This potential should be further exploited in order to make the district more student-friendly and to create a “shared campus”. Mixed uses between working, living and housing also welcome an innovative commercial area 4.0 location. In order to make a traffic turnaround as efficient as possible, a logistics center is planned in the north of Mühldorf near the freeway in order to intercept goods and passenger traffic there and bring it to the city in a targeted manner by means of a passenger or freight streetcar. This can relieve Mühldorf in the long term by significantly reducing the high volume of heavy goods traffic and cars within the city.
In this way, a diverse, liveable and sustainable urban development can be created in line with the needs and ideas of residents and workers alike and a future-oriented, attractive location can be secured.
The design was created as part of “Mühldorf 2053”, an interdisciplinary project as part of the Master’s degree in Urban Studies at the Technical University of Munich. You can read more about the background to the project here, and the designs of other students can be found here.
