Project business card
The business card project was an urban development project presented to the city council of Ludwigshafen am Rhein on December 12, 1958 by the chief building officer Ziegler , which was approved by the city council in February 1959.
aims
Several objectives were pursued with this business card project:
- A more representative design of the core city.
- Construction of a town hall as a counterpart to the BASF high-rise .
- Tying purchasing power in the city of Ludwigshafen
The starting point was the redesign of the anniversary square . The aim of the project was to anchor the city center as the crown of the city as a whole in the consciousness of the population and to emphasize the functions of the core city more strongly. This goal should be achieved through open spaces, through the creation of views and the establishment of rear control surfaces.
In addition, the city should be visually upgraded with a nicer entrance gate . For this purpose, the Jubiläumsplatz, today's Berliner Platz, was to be redesigned with the town hall and the circular building of the Kaufhof, the so-called “cake box”. As part of this redesign, practically all previous buildings except for the anchor yard should disappear.
By demolishing the former palace building and the old department store (Tietz department store from 1930), space should be created for the new round department store building and a high-rise town hall on Hochstrasse. Today the Mosch high-rise stands at the designated place.
planning
In general, through traffic should be kept away from the inner city area more than previously planned and be guided over the city via elevated roads, decoupled from the normal road network. Elevated roads, rings, tangents and city highways appeared as a solution to traffic planning based on the US model. The traffic planners believed that with such structures, the city would definitely be upgraded, with a specific aesthetic in which elevated highways were considered modern.
In an article from 1958, the General-Anzeiger summarized the basic ideas of the senior building officer Georg Ziegler as follows:
- "We want to build a beautiful city for around 150,000 to 220,000 people. It is not in our interest to create a concentration of 300,000 or 400,000 people."
It should be noted that in 2006, almost fifty years later, Ludwigshafen had a population of 167,000 people. The article also says:
- "In cooperation with the state and industry, an ideal city is to be created that largely spares the residents the hardships of traffic and allows the individual districts to live their own lives if possible."
poll
The business card project was approved in February 1959 by the Ludwigshafen city council against five CDU votes (some of the CDU city councils did not vote) in front of a lively auditorium. The CDU had no alternative to urban development and was divided. The CDU criticized the lack of transparency and CDU Councilor Paul Fischer expressed his concerns as follows: "In all respect for the Stadtbauamt I can not agree because I do not know if it does not but is a better proposal." The haste with which the project was whipped through was suspect. But what did he want to do against an SPD whose representatives themselves said that the “wishes of the economy” should be decisive.
Mayor Wagner tried to refute the objection that the new Hochstraße could induce drivers from the Palatinate to drive straight through to Mannheim , but his argument was not convincing. From today's perspective, it is easy to see that this objection was justified.
A year later it would become clear that the CDU, like its only competition, was a party of modernization. In order to give the city a “green heart”, CDU city councilor Adelbert Starck was ready for further demolitions and population relocations in a redesign plan calculated over 25 years. In 1964, the chairman of the CDU city council faction, Helmut Kohl , called for “future-oriented planning” and wanted to outbid what had already been done.
activities
As part of this project, elevated roads were laid out and the Ludwigshafen main train station relocated and converted from a terminus to a through station.
The redesign of the city center could not be implemented as quickly as planned due to the fierce resistance in parts of the population. The citizens did not oppose the urban redevelopment, but did not want a department store as the center, but a quiet complex like the Mannheim water tower .
Construction of elevated roads
The construction of the elevated roads began from the newly built Rhine bridge . This first large piece of elevated road was opened on July 9, 1959 and was the beginning of the girdling of the city center with high-speed lines. Federal Transport Minister Hans-Christoph Seebohm , who handed the 900-meter-long and 24 million mark expensive facility open to traffic, emphasized its uniqueness in Europe. Comparable can only be found in the USA and Australia. A concrete model was the urban motorway network built in Tokyo for the 1964 Olympics.
Forty years later, due to the concrete construction and the high volume of traffic, these elevated roads have to be renovated or rebuilt at great expense.
Relocation of the main station
In 1962, with the signing of an agreement between the city of Ludwigshafen and the Deutsche Bundesbahn, the implementation of a long-awaited transport project began - the construction of a through station and the abandonment of the terminal station that had existed since 1847. This agreement was made possible by plans of the city for the construction of a north bridge and the desire of the railway to accelerate the rail traffic. However, the new train station was relocated to the western periphery of the city center and was located one kilometer from the city's business center.
The new through station was inaugurated in 1969, but its unfavorable location meant that it did not develop into the center of a new city center. It was also not connected to the rapid transit network.
The northern elevated road and the town hall center were built on the area that became free at the site of the old train station .
Construction of a subway tram
As a first step in the implementation of more extensive plans for a subway in Ludwigshafen and Mannheim, an underground tram stop was built at the new main train station and a tram tunnel crossed under the station.
A tram line to Mannheim was built over the Kurt-Schumacher-Brücke , which is separate from private traffic and which also leads through a tunnel there. At the main post office, an underground stop was built on two levels, with a tunnel running under the elevated road to the new main station, and a separate track leading to the BASF high-rise .
Further plans, in particular the tunneling under Bismarckstrasse and Berliner Platz, were no longer implemented.
In 2008 the underground tram connection between the town hall and the main train station was taken out of service and the second level of the town hall stop was shut down.
Conclusion
The consequences of the construction of elevated roads were the growing need for space for traffic structures and the displacement of pedestrians to another level.
In the 1950s and 1960s, city planners assumed a "supremacy of the automobile", which was equated with technical progress. In 1954 , the German Association of Cities, in its twenty guiding principles, called for the separation of modes of transport, the construction of bypasses and pedestrian crossings and underpasses. The traffic planners viewed the tram as a powerful main means of transport, while journalists and politicians, under the impression of mass motorization, now described them as old-fashioned.
See also
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Many want new Hochstraße, morgenweb, May 15, 2013, accessed on July 20, 2013.