The future of city centers 2030
The final event of the scenario process on the future of city centres in South Westphalia was held at the end of June. The process was supported by the University of Applied Sciences Südwestfalen, the Competence Center E-Commerce and the City Lab Südwestfalen. A participatory process with two large workshops was planned for spring 2020. Due to the corona pandemic, the procedure was modified at short notice, so that the scenarios were created in several online workshops. In this process, the various stakeholders from over 20 municipalities contributed their heterogeneous perspectives and points of view, thus contributing significantly to the breadth of the results.
This resulted in eight visions of the future for city centres, ranging from the "regional marketplace" and "Service shapes reinvention" to the "desolation of the city centre".
The eight scenarios deal with four core areas: economic development and digitisation, quality of life and citizen participation, sustainability and local politics, and the retail and marketplace function of the city centre.
The scenarios developed are now available to the municipalities as tools to enable them to make decisions on inner city projects taking into account possible future developments and thus being more robust for the future.
The results are also compiled in a study and can be downloaded here (in German).
