Monitoring und Evaluation von Stadt- und Regionalentwicklung

Over many years, indicator-based methods have been in development and under trial to support the implementation of the Leitbilder (or “guiding visions”) of sustainable spatial and urban development. Work to identify such indicators, which are intended to provide a means of monitoring and evaluating progress towards this goal, has been going on at the European, Federal, state and increasingly also at regional and municipal levels. One of the principle concerns associated with these Leitbilder is land-resource policy, and in particular arriving at a policy for the development of areas of settlement which in sparing in its consumption of open space. In addition, the requirement to monitor environmental impacts is now enshrined in both federal and state-level planning law in respect of plans and programmes. Particularly with regard to Strategic Environmental Assessment, there are now clear signs within formal procedures of attempts being made to monitor environmental impact and spatial development. The challenges posed by the need to monitor and evaluate urban and regional development are extremely complex. Within the framework of the work group dedicated to the “Monitoring and Evaluation of Urban and Regional Development” set up by the ARL’s Regional Working Group Bavaria, whose findings are reported here, it has not been possible to subject all of these new tasks to extensive and detailed scrutiny. The questions and cases chosen for inclusion in the work group’s programme are in particular those which currently need to be – or are being – addressed in Bavaria, and which are of current interest from a technical perspective in the context of monitoring and evaluating rural and urban development. Within this technical spectrum, the topics and cases which have been selected are those in which the main focus is on the role of planning with regard to such “soft factors” as co-ordination and steering development, and the corresponding approaches to monitoring and evaluation which have been developed. Throughout the papers presented here, an attempt has also been made to take due account of the current state both of technical developments and of the law in the field covered.