Coaxing Lightness from a Stubborn Material

So mobility plays an important role in large urban areas that also have rural sections. How can sustainability develop here?

Schneidewind: “Mobility is increasingly mea­sured in terms of accessibility. The question of how we create accessibility will probably shift bit by bit from individually owned auto­mobiles to other mobility links, especially in large urban areas. In other words, where rural areas are interspersed, cars will have a role to play. But not in the sense that you drive from point A to point B, if B is somewhere in the center of a large city. Instead, there will be links to the next park­ and ­ride, where people will use other mobility options. This will be within a much more networked structure. It won’t start in rural areas, but will develop outward from urban centers. In large cities and the centers of large cities, automobiles will play an increasingly minor role, because other qualities of city living will be important there.

This has been imple­mented for some time in a number of cities in Scandinavia and the Netherlands – in Amster­dam, for example, where you can’t drive into the city center anymore. The more consistently this is implemented, the more the idea of parking in front of a store, a department store, and then simply loading up goods will disappear. Even if you come by car, you get to experience the qual­ities of the big city by parking the car outside, either directly on the outskirts of the city or at the park­-and­-ride 5 km away. Then you take the train into the city center. This change in direct urban mobility will create a big shift in mobility patterns in rural areas too.”

Looking at the future, does private ownership of land conflict with the sustainable development of urban areas?

Schneidewind: “We’ve noticed that when cities ensure long­term public ownership of a large part of their land and buildings, like in Vienna, they gain an advantage over cities whose over­all housing policy has resulted in more massive privatization, including in terms of mobility policy and sustainable urban design. You can reinforce public welfare features through public ownership of land and buildings. It’s a lot harder to deal with private ownership when access is no longer possible. Hybrid solutions could play a significant role here. These solutions could be based on public ownership, but include lease­hold rights for private investors so they can use their capital to design things jointly with the public sector and thus bring public and private interests together in a positive way. The starting point, of course, is that the public sector has to have at least some kind of leverage. Cities that were smart enough to keep a significant amount of land in their own hands during the era of massive privatization are truly blessed.”

If it’s in the common interest, should there be an enforceable expropriation policy?

Schneidewind: “Certain instruments, like the right of first refusal, are already available to munici­palities today. Now windows of opportunity have also appeared with newly reconfigured down­towns. Changes in shopping behavior have caused the value of Kaufhof chain stores and many other properties to drop drastically, and they’re being vacated because large retail subcontractors are leaving the city centers. This creates windows of opportunity for public acquisition of these buildings, making it possible to implement a completely different approach to inner city design.”

Shouldn’t we also consider some fundamental corrections to our economic system?

Schneidewind: “Going one step further to put certain forms of private property in the city into public hands, in other words to effectively nationalize them, will be a subject of hot debate for years to come. We had this in Berlin with the referendum on expropriating large real estate companies. At the very least, we saw an increa­sed acceptance of the fundamental legitimacy of considering something like this and bringing it into the political discussion. There’s a sense that we actually need this discussion. Yet it will be incredibly difficult to gain majority acceptance for this. If even the approach to tax breaks for the wealthy is sacrosanct, I wouldn’t want to imagine the debate if politicians were to demand wide­spread nationalization of our urban areas in order to make cities more sustainable for the common good. There’s no grassroots support for that. What I would like to see is a much more open dis­cussion in the scientific community. Mainstream economic sciences actually engage in no critical discussion of many of these side effects. As a result, the intellectual sphere that would be re­quired to create political programs and demands doesn’t exist. We still have a long way to go.”

Does the economist in you sometimes argue with the politician in you?

Schneidewind: “They actually get along pretty well. They’re also both frustrated by how little can be negotiated in emotional worlds charged with populism. Even regarding things that can actually be discussed in a reasonable manner. The politician in me wishes that what I the eco­nomist and many others have thought about in terms of perspectives and analyses could enter the political discourse in some way. Often it doesn’t, because we’re well aware that as soon as certain types of arguments are brought into the political arena, populism immediately blows them away. It can be sobering. I suspect this is an expression of the tendency, even in modern enlightened democracies, for politics to become more and more intellectually diminished.”

What are your experiences after almost three years as mayor in Wuppertal, especially in con­nection with the concept of future art that you developed, i.e. creative commerce interacting with economic, technological, institutional and cultural dynamics?

Schneidewind: “We might take the work of an artist like Tony Cragg as a starting point, whose instal­lation of three stone columns entitled “Points of View” is also depicted on the cover of the book Die Große Transformation. What it comes down to is coaxing lightness out of a stubborn material, using the idea of what’s within the material of a block of stone and then the energy and perseverance needed to bring it out. An extremely motivating experience is that an urban area like Wuppertal is full of co­artists, people sustained by the possibilities of making things more future­-oriented, where they can join energies. And this is often what’s needed, because the political and administrative material is strong and it takes a lot of energy to make room for the delicate forms of the future. There are some wonderful successes, but also a lot of setbacks. Ideas get stuck in granite cores that are far too hard, and even when you keep chiseling away, you can’t get them to emerge cleanly. This tension is the key to shaping good urban policy.”

Henning Klüver conducted this interview with Uwe Schneidewind in May 2023.

(Translated from the German original)