Reaching for the skies - steering means of the tertiarisation in Frankfurt am Main
ANERKENNUNG
Project information
submitted by
Victoria Elisabeth Grau
Supervising professorship
Raumplanung und Raumforschung
Advisors
Prof. Dr. Max Welch Guerra, Dott. Mag. Piero Sassi
Degree programme:
Urbanistik (Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.))
Project description
Frankfurt am Main is a city that reinvented itself as a high-rise city with the aim of becoming a financial centre and thus became a pioneer of an neoliberal urban development model. While highrise construction has so far been investigated primarily in architectural and structural terms, the thesis expands the discourse through a planning analysis of the economic, political and social preconditions and effects of highrise development from 1945 to 1986.
The development of high-rise buildings in Frankfurt depicts far more than the mere instrumentalisation of high-rise buildings as economic means of promotion. While until the end of the 1970s the logic of a business-oriented planning strategy was still expressed, under the CDU in the 1980s it was shaped into an urban development model of its own. The planning shift under the CDU is evaluated in the thesis as a cultural expansion of planning policy, which was expressed in terms of urban development and urban space and aimed at the metropolisation of Frankfurt. The intensive expansion of the cultural infrastructure contained therein is contextualised in terms of its functions for the city's development goals. This shows how the business urban development policy intervened in social and housing policy through pseudo-cultural-political argumentation and drove the planned exchange of the urban population.