Specialised concept for brownfields
On 4 November 2009, the city council adopted the urban development concept (SEKo for short) - Chemnitz 2020. Within the SEKo, various specialised concepts and their key areas of action were coordinated with one another. The guiding principle of the urban development concept is to stabilise the urban structure by prioritising the development of inner-city areas. A specialised concept for brownfield sites was not part of the task at the time.
The brownfields section of the programme was developed on the basis of internal surveys of the City of Chemnitz's brownfields register. The specialist concept for brownfield sites for the Chemnitz 2020 urban development concept was adopted by the city council on 8 July 2015. In accordance with the "RL Sustainable Urban Development ERDF 2014 to 2020" funding programmes, this forms the prerequisite for funding applications for brownfield revitalisation.
The recording of brownfields in the internal brownfields register is based on Section 1a, which was newly formulated with the amendment of the German Building Code: "The necessity of converting agricultural land or land used as forest should be justified; this should be based on investigations into the possibilities for internal development, which may include in particular brownfield sites, vacant buildings, gaps between buildings and other opportunities for redensification."
In principle, in the context of the political requirements for sustainable land utilisation (30-hectare target), there is no alternative to the development that has been embarked upon. The brownfield sites recorded across the city amount to around 600 hectares and therefore correspond to around 11% of the settlement area. The return of land resources to the land cycle is associated with an improvement in the urban structure from an economic, social and ecological perspective.