Avantis (business park)

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Avantis welcome sign
Solland Solar Energy company building

The Avantis European Science and Business Park, or Avantis for short , is a cross-border business park in the municipalities of Heerlen in the Netherlands and Aachen in Germany . The area of ​​the business park is about 40 hectares .

At the end of the 1990s, the cities of Heerlen and Aachen founded a joint venture for a business park that would be on both Dutch and German territory. The most suitable location for this project was an open, agricultural area near the village of Bocholtz, which belongs to the Dutch municipality of Simpelveld , near the federal motorway 4 , the Dutch motorway A 76 and the Heerlen city ​​motorway N 281 and the Buitenring Parkstad Limburg N 300 . Citizens' initiatives on both sides of the border had already rejected an industrial park at the end of the 1980s (slogan: “We want to pollute Aachen's northwestern region”). After the SPD had won the local elections in 1988 with the promise to follow the vote of the citizens, its then MEP Dieter Schinzel found the new location with an “intelligent look at the map”, shifted 500 meters to the west on the border, and made a promise also EU funding. In addition, the city council decided on April 24, 1991 that the new industrial area should now be a pure "high-tech industrial area" for the IT industry and without emission-intensive companies. In the WDR environmental program Dschungel , the well-known television presenter Jean Pütz described the Avantis project as an “example of the ignorance and arrogance of politics”. It was not until 2001 that the area was designed to such an extent that companies could settle there. It should be possible to use the infrastructure of both countries.

The proponents of the industrial park had overlooked the fact that this use, especially the more favorable tax advantages, required a German-Dutch state treaty. This was not closed until December 2007, almost ten years after the start of construction.

Avantis was therefore not successful, and the economic downturn, particularly in the IT industry, made matters worse. In a contribution by the WDR science program Leonardo on the subject of nature conservation / land use, the Aachen head of economic affairs, Manfred Sicking, admitted for the first time in 2008 that the focus on "high-tech" was wrong at the time and that the tax model did not work because it was disregarding EU law have.

At first there were only a few companies and two completely or partially empty office buildings. In 2008, the multinational management consultancy Capgemini settled in the business park. In 2005, Solland Solar Energy (the largest Dutch producer of solar cells ) and Electrical Naebers were added. In 2013 the Honold Logistik Gruppe bought 82,000 m² of space in order to create a 44,000 m² logistics property. The community park is now seeing further demand as a result of significant changes in the development plan. Due to the large space available, Avantis is gaining in importance, especially in the area of ​​e-commerce. In 2015 the online mail order pharmacy DocMorris opened its new logistics and administration center on around 16,000 m².

On December 5, 2010, a detailed article appeared in the Aachener Zeitung, which reveals the planning errors around Avantis and their consequences. Editor Eckhard Jedicke takes up the case in the editorial of issue 1/2011 of the renowned specialist journal Naturschutz und Landschaftsplanung . He calls for "more openness and honesty" in the opportunities and risks of construction projects and cites Avantis as a negative example. Politicians had "obviously promised the people there a cloud cuckoo land, a castle in the air".

Since 2011 there have been plans to partially reactivate the partially closed Aachen – Maastricht line and to build a new line (Via Avantis) by Avantis in order to better connect the industrial park to local public transport . The construction of this route has already been taken into account in the Avantis zoning plan . and the new rail line should go into operation in December 2016. However, the plans for this did not go beyond mere declarations of intent and instead alternatives were discussed. At the beginning of 2019, the LIMAX regional express began operating from Aachen via Herzogenrath and Heerlen to Maastricht . The Via Avantis is included as a "long-term measure" in the current local transport plan of the Rhineland Local Transport Association and the planned route is kept free.

Since 1 April 2012, Avantis is the call-line Taxi 74 ( Aachen bus station - Central Station - West Railway Station - Avantis) of ASEAG approached.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Aachener Volkszeitung, April 25, 1991
  2. ↑ C. Mayr: Land Murder with Tax Money? In: Kosmos , Heft 7/1998, pp. 94–95
  3. ^ WDR television, April 20, 1999, 8.15 p.m.
  4. ^ Aachener Zeitung, April 19, 2006
  5. ↑ WDR 5, Leonardo , March 21, 2008
  6. ↑ DocMorris builds on the cross-border Avantis industrial park . Aachener Zeitung from October 8, 2014.
  7. ↑ Marlon Gego: The almost forgotten industrial ruin on the border. In: Aachener Zeitung. December 4, 2010, accessed July 15, 2019 .
  8. ^ Eckhard Jedicke: honesty instead of cloud cuckoo land . In: Nature conservation and landscape planning . Edition 01/2011, 2011, ISSN  0940-6808 , p. 1 ( nul-online.de [accessed July 15, 2019]).
  9. ↑ Via Avantis ( Memento of the original from September 14, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on the website of the Know Linx project (Dutch). @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.knowlinx.eu
  10. ↑ Template FB 61/0604 / WP16 of the city of Aachen from January 25, 2012.
  11. ^ Udo Kals: Past Avantis directly from Aachen to Maastricht . In: Aachener Zeitung from April 10, 2014.
  12. ^ Regional technical article on public (rail) local public transport and multimodality to the Cologne regional plan. (pdf) Local Transport Association Rhineland , February 19, 2019, accessed on February 25, 2019 .
  13. ^ Aachener Verkehrsverbund (publisher): New direct connection to the AVANTIS industrial park (archive report).

Coordinates: 50 ° 50 ′ 3.5 ″  N , 6 ° 1 ′ 13.7 ″  E