Regional city

A regional city describes the formation of a federal large commune from a core city and its suburban surrounding communities .

In contrast to the actual incorporation , which does not change the inner constitution of the core city, a regional city is given a two-tier administrative structure. While the regional level performs city- wide tasks, city districts or sub-municipalities are responsible for local matters.

The concept of the regional city was discussed for several central European city regions in the 1960s and 1970s , but was mostly discarded in favor of less binding city-surrounding associations .

At first, the term was used more in the context of the settlement structure and geography than in the administrative context. It goes back to Rudolf Hillebrecht and Wilhelm Wortmann . In 1962 Hillebrecht published a schematic sketch for the development of a new urban form of the urban region with around 2 million inhabitants . This new form of the urban region consists of several larger, closely intertwined settlement centers and open spaces in between. The settlement centers are to be connected to the city by rapid transit trains. New residential construction focal points line up on the rapid transit axes. Large secondary centers around 20 km from the city center form the axis endpoints.

Realized regional cities

Regional city projects not yet implemented

Frankfurt am Main ( regional city of Frankfurt , 1971, urban district of Frankfurt (1971 and 2003))
Hanover (instead, the Hanover region has existed as a regional district since 2001 )
Amsterdam ( City Province of Amsterdam , 1996)
Rotterdam ( city province of Rijnmond )
Ruhrstadt (also: Metropole Ruhr)

literature

Michael König (2009): Regional City Frankfurt - A concept after 100 years of city-surrounding discourse in Berlin, Hanover and Frankfurt am Main . Workbooks of the Institute for Urban and Regional Planning of the TU Berlin , Issue 75, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-7983-2114-4 .