Scenarios and Patterns for Regiobranding – Rural-urban Territories in the Metropolitan Region Hamburg

Background:
Project Regiobranding
Regiobranding, an R&D project financed by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research
BMBF from 2014–19, is part of the FONA initiative aimed at enhancing research for sustainable
development. Regiobranding works on concepts for the branding of urban-rural regions
through cultural landscape characteristics. Addressing regional competitiveness through valorisation
of cultural and natural capital, Regiobranding is working on three subspaces of the Hamburg
Metropolitan Region in order to strengthen identification processes beyond municipal limits. Regiobranding
deals with several currently debated issues of settlement and landscape development:
the formation processes of metropolitan regions throughout Europe as a combination of urban and
rural parts; the search for new concepts and articulation of Leitbilder and spatial visions; and the
development of regional formation processes of social, economic, and cultural positioning.
Organisation
Regiobranding is organised as transdisciplinary “innovation-group” project, initiated and coordinated
by the Chair of Landscape Planning and Nature Protection (Institute of Environmental Planning)
of Leibniz Universität Hannover. Further scientific partners are the Chair for Regional Building
and Urban Planning (Institute of Urban Design and Planning), the Chair for Spatial and Regional
Development (Institute of Environmental Planning), and the Chair for Land and Real Estate Management
(Institute of Geodesy) of Leibniz Universität Hannover, as well as the Institute of Archaeology
of the University of Hamburg, the Institute of Economic Research Niedersachsen NIW, and the
planning office Mensch und Region MuR. Practice partners are the State Office for Archaeology
Schleswig-Holstein, the District Ludwigslust-Parchim (department for regional management), the
City of Lübeck (department for environmental, nature, and consumer protection), and the association
Landschaftspflegeverein Dummersdorfer Ufer e.V.. The Hamburg Metropolitan Region is
supporting the project. Furthermore, additional regional and local institutions, experts, and organisations
are involved in the work of the transdisciplinary R&D project; they are expected to capitalise
on the innovation process of Regiobranding.
Focus Regions
The target areas (Focus Regions) of the project are characterised by forming new cooperative areas
in the larger framework of the metropolitan region, in inter-district or inter-state constellations,
especially in Lübeck-Nordwestmecklenburg (states of Schleswig-Holstein and of Mecklenburg-
Vorpommern) and Griese Gegend–Elbe–Wendland (states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and of
Niedersachsen), which integrate in the target areas parts of two states, with all the implied legal,
26
INTRO