INTEGRAted Management and Revitalisation of Contaminated SITES

Site recycling in the city of Cologne

The city of Cologne is with about 1 million inhabitants and an area of approx. 410 km2, one of the largest cities of Germany. The change in structure that has been having consequences not only for the Ruhr District since the middle of the eighties, leads to a change for Cologne also, from being a chemistry and metal processing place, into becoming a centre for the supply of services and media.
Problems are to be faced in the transformation of brownfields formerly used by industry into sensibly redeveloped land, for example, for housing purposes or the provision of other services.

In various programs like e.g. "Domestic Building 2000" or "Allocation of industrial real estate" the requirements for land redevelopment have been met in the last 15 years.
The Federal Government has stipulated in its program for 2010 a sustainable decrease of land consumption.
Within the framework of this agreement the daily consumption of 120 ha will have to be decreased to 30 ha. That means that we will have to resort to former industry and trade areas on a larger scale. In the context of these Regulations The city of Cologne is going to launch a program, the "strategic land management" which will have the assignment of optimally covering, evaluating and marketing the land of the city of Cologne.

A further important aspect in connection with the term „land recycling“ is the subject of brownfield sites. Land Recycling can only be applied, if information on land use is available.
The city of Cologne has been leading since the beginning of the eighties a register of brownfields, in which the biggest part of old waste deposits and an important part of the abandoned industrial sites are listed. Nowadays there are 780 old deposits and approx. 10.000 brownfield sites that have been graphically and alphanumerically recorded.
These data have a high value when allocating land for a new use.
It is planned to resort to this fundus for land revitalisation; thus land consumption of greenfields will be reduced through the use of brownfield land. The areas will be approved for appropriate uses in most cases according to their contamination rates. In the case, that the loads are too high even for nonsensitive uses, safety and rehabilitation measures will be taken. Independently from that, groundwater impairments will always be removed.

The planned "strategic land management" will play an important role, because the sustainable evolution of a city can only be influenced by a unanimous processing of the area data; by this the urban land use planning will be consistently promoted.