The planned Bürkle Bleiche Center will continue to provide material for discussion. Now a committee of architects is getting involved.
It’s been ten years since the city of Emmendingen organized the first public information on local supply in Bürkle-Bleiche. After further events, such as the town talk and the planning workshop, the plans for the new Bürkle-Bleiche-Center were presented last September. The plan is to build a supermarket with a sales area of 2,300 square meters. Apartments will also be built on top of the building. This proposal was accepted in April 2022 with one dissenting vote by the Emmendinger municipal council.
Some residents in Bürkle-Bleiche have opposed the plans and have also managed to initiate a citizens’ forum. With the forum, which the municipal council approved with a large majority at the end of January, the applicants want to influence the planning once again and counteract the possible deficiencies they see. A few days before the vote in the council committee, the planning advisory board of the chamber of architects, chamber groups Freiburg-Stadt and Breisgau-Hochschwarzwald/Emmendingen, wrote to the city administration and the council factions.
Densification is expressly welcomed
In it, the members, twelve architects, welcome the project of urban densification and the combination of the shopping center with the apartments above. But: “In this specific case, there is apparently a conflict of interest that has not yet been resolved. The structure in the preliminary draft published to date would make maximum use of the developable area with the planned shopping market. The market would then move very closely to Lessingstrasse and Rosenweg. It would only to the eastern part of the Bürkle-Bleiche-Center. To all three adjoining street spaces, the rear facades on the first two floors would be mostly closed due to the ancillary rooms planned there. A large, well-functioning shopping market would be created and urgently needed additional apartments above it. The urban development However, the potential that a reorganization of this area offers for the entire quarter would in no way be exhausted,” the letter said. The citizens’ forum had also introduced this argument.
No response from the parties contacted
After no feedback was received from the city administration and the parliamentary groups, the letter has now been made public. The committee has been working on the project for several months and was made aware of it by the initiators of the citizens’ forum. “However, we don’t just allow ourselves to be put in front of the cart by individual interests,” says Frank Heinz, architect in Waldkirch and deputy spokesman for the planning advisory board. The committee recommends “fundamentally questioning the present planning once again. From our point of view, an architectural realization competition for the western Bürkle-Bleiche Center in combination with an urban planning ideas competition for the entire center of the Bürkle-Bleiche area would offer the opportunity to a variety of approaches to finding a better balance for the conflict of interest that has not yet been resolved.”
Don’t create a Kaufhaus Kraussian relationship
BZ wrote to the parliamentary groups and the city to ask how they felt about the planning advisory board’s proposal. While the CDU and Free Voters did not comment – no response was received from “Die Faction” and the city administration (here due to illness) by the time of going to press – the SPD welcomes the willingness of the planning advisory board to accompany the developments in Emmendingen competently and creatively. However, the timing is regrettable, an “architectural realization competition would set the previous plans to zero and lead to considerable time delays”. The Greens also assess the timing of the statement unfavorably, the planning advisory board “should not have escaped the fact that the planning, including the presentation to the public and various participation formats, has been underway for several years,” it says. In addition, competitions are held at the beginning of object planning. For the FDP, Patrick Bauer advocates a competition “as far as it can be implemented legally and actually”. The factions unanimously say that citizen participation in the form of the citizens’ forum is not called into question. According to the FDP, it is important to seize the opportunity to shape the Bürkle-Bleiche district. However, according to the SPD parliamentary group, “no Kraussian conditions should arise. This would not be in the interests of the largest district of Emmendingen.”
