UBoPlus – New land use policy in the City of Ulm

Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)

April 2025 – March 2030

ZIRIUS

TU Dortmund, Faculty of Spatial Planning, Department of Urban Development
City of Ulm
Wissenschaftsladen Bonn e.V.

The joint project UBoPlus is funded by the BMBF as part of the funding guideline Transformation Cluster Social Innovations for Sustainable Cities under the umbrella of the Transformation Initiative Urban-Rural-Future. The core of the transformation cluster is the city of Ulm. With its decades-long active land use policy, it can be described as a frontrunner in land use policy in Germany. Nevertheless, Ulm is confronted with considerable challenges due to the crisis-ridden development of construction costs and land prices, the required decarbonization of the building sector, the shortage of developable land and, at the same time, continuing population growth. In Ulm, new concepts for inward development and the renewal of existing building stocks have to be developed and implemented in close interaction with civil society, considering new conflicts between efficiency and sufficiency goals in housing and urban planning. The work in the transformation cluster is being supported by three reflection municipalities, namely Aachen, Freiburg and Leipzig. The Association of German Cities and the vhw Bundesverband für Wohnen und Stadtentwicklung e.V. (Federal Association for Housing and Urban Development) will ensure that the results are transferred throughout Germany.

ZIRIUS is responsible for actor and conflict analyses, policy design and a scenario process. At the heart of this work is the development of consistent and synergistic policy mixes for an innovative land use policy. These mixes combine land policy instruments that have already been tried and tested in Ulm with new instruments, from the fields of leasehold, inward development and participation. The policy design process also reflects and analyzes the existing challenges of multi-level governance and prepares the results in a practical way so that the relevant actors in Ulm's city administration can simulate them in simulation games. Finally, the robustness of the policy mixes is determined as part of a participatory and exploratory scenario process.