The students in Frankfurt’s Westend had enough on this mild late summer evening in September 1970. An Art Nouveau house at Eppsteiner Straße 47 was to be torn down by an investor and replaced by a high -rise building. A good two dozen people now moved up with posters and color buckets – and quickly occupied the building. It was the first house line -up in Germany. Dozens of more should follow and result in bloody street battles three years later. It was a first signal that something fundamentally changed in the perspective of the Germans on the structural redesign of their cities. The beginning of the 1970s was a break in Germany in many ways. Social norms shift after the 68 movement. The relationship between state and citizens became different and thus also from the citizen to his city. A lot of things changed for the better, the cities became more livable, the air cleaner. But at that time the foundation stones were also laid for what the country paralyzes today. The 1970s became the bureaucracy turnaround in German history. A creeping process began, which made building more and more complicated, increasingly expensive, and slower, and the years of economic growth had previously triggered a building boom that was unparalleled: residential construction flourished thanks to strong state support; The country was covered with highways; New coal and nuclear power plants provided the citizens with electricity for the electrical devices that many of them have now afforded. Whole districts have been created in the destroyed cities, such as the Frankfurt northwest city or the Berlin Gropiusstadt. In between 1953 and 1968, the number of newly built apartments was stable at more than 500,000. In 1973 she rose again to over 700,000. Then the housing broke in as part of the oil crisis. Apart from a short -term boom after reunification, he never reached the old level again. In the end, there were only a good 200,000 apartments a year. The Köhlbrandbrücke in Hamburg, a symbol of the city, was built in four years in the early 1970s, which was already a significant delay. Two were actually planned. You can only dream of that today. In April 2024, the Hamburg citizens decided to demolish and build the dilapidated bridge. The completion is planned for the 2042, the old bridge is then demolished, which should then happen in 2046 according to the plans. So that the bridge lasts for so long, there has recently been a stricter speed limit. This text comes from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. However, little was taken into account for residents and the environment. Anyone who lived close to a traffic artery or a coal -fired power plant had been unlucky. The energy hunger of the population wanted to be breastfed with more and more fossil fuels. Whole villages had to give way to brown coal mining. The “car -friendly city” was the declared goal of the city planner, catalysts are far from mandatory. Across the Berlin Wilhelminian style quarters, they pulled a city highway that changed the character of the city sustainably, but the mood overturned in the early 1970s. In addition to investor projects such as that in Frankfurt, the anger of the citizens, not least in the expansion of nuclear energy. A citizens’ initiative was formed against the construction of the Würgassen nuclear power plant in East Westphalia, which a newspaper author even declared the “emergency of democracy”. The activists moved to court and could not prevent the construction of the power plant, but could achieve an important success in the “Würgassen-judgment” of 1972. For the first time, environmental protection issues were not viewed as a subordinate topic, but as equivalent with other interests, and resistance also grew in the cities. In 1974 the citizens’ initiative Westtangente formed itself in Berlin in protest against another city highway. Through years of protests, she managed to prevent the construction of the highway. The sociologist Maren Harnack describes this very clearly: The modern settlement building of the post -war period had “made available for the first time comfortable, healthy and affordable living space”. With the 68 movement, a paradigm shift was now used, which was mainly carried by an educated middle class. Increased by the oil crisis and the report of the Club of Rome, which critically dealt with the “limits of growth” in 1972, a change of values began. The settlement construction for the masses was now derogatory as “Fordism in private life”, an allusion to the mass production of the American autopionier. The single -family house was romanticized as well as the inner -city old building. This was not only appealed in the left spectrum, but also among conservatives that criticized the new settlements as places of “drug addiction, crime and violence”. This creates a number of laws that aimed at a more careful building-and as a side effect, the bureaucratic requirements were raised. At the time, the Federal Republic wrote the FAZ, “competed with Japan and certain parts of the United States for first place in air pollution.” The Rhine, which supplied 2.5 million people with drinking water, had become “Europe’s largest dirt channel”. That should change. In 1974 important building block from Genscher’s program became the Federal Immission Control Act. It should protect citizens from noise, smells or pollutants. From now on, construction projects needed extensive immission report, the procedures were pulled in length. Accordingly, the purpose of the law was “preventing harmful environmental effects.” According to the lawyer Cass Sunstein, it also requires regulation “if it is not yet clear whether serious environmental risks exist”. If one follows this principle to its logical conclusion, political measures are justified, which are associated with very high costs. After all, you can never be careful enough. Preserving the “townscape” and the “composition of the population” the legislative cascade of the 1970s continued afterwards. In 1976 the Federal Nature Conservation Act and an energy saving law followed as a result of the oil crisis a few years earlier. For the first time, the insulation of houses became an issue to save heating oil and gas. “Against wild growth and speculation in urban planning” the government wanted to proceed, in 1974 in the FAZ the municipalities were assigned extensive planning rights. For the first time, a “demolition permit” was introduced, which had to catch up with who wanted to tear down a house. The goal is to preserve a “townscape” and the “composition of the population”, which reads like an early criticism of gentrification, but the environmental and urban planning requirements themselves were not alone who made building more complicated. In addition, extensive citizen participations now appeared in the building law. To date, it is often not the state itself, but it is the residents that bring construction projects to a standstill, be it the electricity lines, which are important for the energy transition, new rail connections or the compression of residential areas by apartment buildings. If it is still being built, then usually after a long delay and too higher costs. This effect has been dismissed since the nineties with the so-called Aarhus Convention, which on the one hand made public construction projects more transparent, but on the other hand it has continued to build the building. For example, environmental associations now had the opportunity to sue, no longer only directly affected – and they used it eagerly. But it started in many ways in the early 1970s. The measures at that time seem to be understandable from their time and still ensured a gradual process that made everything slower. In addition, there were editions at the European level for the first time, which continued to complicate the construction. “Difficult to draw up a development plan against which someone does not complain” about it: The managing director of the Central Institute for Spatial Planning, Susan Grotefels, does not change in the building law itself. There, the state building regulations say that a building permit should always be granted if nothing else advocated it. Only over time spoke more and more, especially in environmental law. “The building lawyers didn’t take care of it,” says Grotefels. With corresponding consequences: “It is very difficult today to draw up a development plan that does not complain to.” The 1970s changed a lot in Germany. The fact that there is clean air in German cities today is a significant achievement. This is precisely that is the irony. The rules that were supposed to protect the environment at the time are now slow down the necessary measures for a more sustainable economy: the construction of wind and solar power plants; of electricity lines between the offshore wind farms in the north and the industry in the south; of railway lines that could shift traffic from the road to rail. And in view of rapid rents, the bureaucracy also proves to be a bottleneck in housing. “There are 16 state building regulations and 4,000 buns. Approval procedures last too long,” criticizes a spokeswoman for Germany’s largest housing company Vonovia. “Processes can often still be done in paper form.” The new federal government has stated some ideas on how that could be changed in the coalition agreement. The industry sees good approaches. A return to the 1960s is not necessary for a new reversal of bureaucracy. A little more weighing up and willingness to compromise would be enough for this.
