- New challenges for city and regional planning: inner development of cities and regions for promoting sustainable development   451 kb by    Elgendy, Hany & Wilske, Sebastian & Seidemann, Dirk | elgendy@isl.uka.de    Short Outline Inner development of cities and regions is becoming a necessity to ensure sustainable growth. Planners should develop new approches that move beyond the old practices that are limited to fulfilling the formal requirements. And to concentrate on utilising the available potentials in cities and regions as a major step towards sustainability. Abstract During the last decades spatial planners were mainly planning the growth of cities and regions, which has formed the planning systems. While many communities are lacking possibilities to grow, potentials for spatial development in the inner parts of settlements are existing and increasing. Therefore inner development is becoming a necessity to ensure sustainable growth. Confronted with these facts, planners have to rethink their theories and instruments to deal with this situation. Inner development potentials in cities and regions are a result of different types of political, economic and technical changes. These are unpredictable and their effects on the urban structure occur on middle- and long-terms. Thus, the first step to implement an inner development strategy is getting an overview about these potentials in the agglomeration and to ensure its continual update and assessment. To achieve this goal, a decentralised information system is needed. Based on this overview, it will be possible to identify priority areas and to develop a strategy for developing these potentials and the needed instruments and processes to activate them. This approach was applied on two projects in the city and the region of Stuttgart in Germany. The first one is concerned with “Sustainable Land Management in the city of Stuttgart”. The second attempts to extend this experience to the regional level in the project “Sustainable regional settlements land management” in the 179 cities and villages of Stuttgart region. In this paper we argue that, by keeping the actual overview of inner development potentials, it is possible to dynamically act according to the changing circumstances in the framework of the inner development strategy. Using this approach it is possible to move beyond the old practices that are limited to fulfilling the formal requirements. Hence to concentrate on utilising the available potentials in cities and regions as a major step towards sustainability. Keywords inner development, land mangment, city planning, regional planning, sustainable development Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2004: Management of Urban Regions   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper