Institute for Social Sustainability

by Jan Scheurer

Introduction, project background and methodology A short history of carfree housing Amsterdam, GWL-terrein: A carfree public housing project Edinburgh, Slateford Green: A mixed-tenure carfree development Hamburg, Stadthaus Schlump: A developer model for mobility management Vienna, Autofreie Mustersiedlung Floridsdorf: A carfree demonstration project Freiburg, Vauban: A sustainable urban district Useful Links and Bibliography 1999 case studies, still accessible: Hamburg, Saarlandstraße: Carfree housing in a non-profit cooperative Cologne: Carfree housing market survey

Introduction, project background and methodology

The research on carfree and car-reduced housing development presented here is part of a PhD project investigating the contribution urban ecology, community and mobility management innovations in residential neighbourhoods can make towards the sustainable transformation of our cities. This objective emerged during an evaluation survey on existing ecological housing areas in metropolitan Copenhagen in 1997 (Scheurer 1998), in which the Australian-based Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy (ISTP) co-operated with the Danish Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, the Danish Research Institute for Forestry, Landscape and Planning (FSL) and the Danish Building Research Institute (SBI).

Research in Copenhagen was based on a total of eleven residential neighbourhoods, representing a host of approaches to urban ecology as pursued by different stakeholders (governments, private industry, community groups) and in different parts of the metropolitan area (inner city, middle suburbs and ex-urban). While it could be established that advances in resource-efficient technology and enhancement of the local community had remarkable effects on sustainability performance in most of the case study areas, the same does not hold true when assessing the residents' individual lifestyles particularly with regard to activities outside the home. Little empirical connection was found between the physical, social and environmental setup of a neighbourhood and its residents' travel behaviour as one of the most significant fields of energy consumption. The reason for this was seen in insufficient policy incentives to the people to adapt to lifestyles embracing sustainable mobility - ie. maximising the use of non-car modes and organising activities close to home - to complement in-house ecological behaviour many already practice.

Hence, the second phase of the dissertation focussed on finding examples for sustainable neighbourhoods where this shortfall had been overcome, and specific strategies for mobility management had been incorporated. Attempts at promoting housing geared especially towards residents not owning cars and ready to maintain lifestyles built around green transport modes first appeared in some European cities during the early 1990s. By the year 2000, over a dozen built examples of housing precincts have sprung up across the continent where mobility management with the aim of minimising car ownership and use is a prominent part of the overall concept. During two European trips in 1999 and 2000, we visited most of them and decided to conduct a residents' survey similar and compatible to the one in Denmark (see above) in a sample of five projects. Once again, these represent a broad spectrum of varying approaches to mobility management, were initiated by different stakeholders (community groups, city authorities, developers or combinations of these) and pursued under the distinct cultural and administrational conditions of five different countries or regions thereof (Netherlands, Scotland, Northern Germany, Austria and Southern Germany).

The surveys were taken during September and October 2000 as personal face-to-face interviews in 50% of all households or a sample of 50 households (whichever is less) chosen at random in each case study area. Our main focus was on demographic structures and mobility profiles; however, some information on ecological behaviour, community interaction, environmental awareness and resident assessment of the neighbourhood concept was also collected. The data reproduced in the following represents average values and distributions grouped by site; the figures on the mixed-tenure projects in Amsterdam and Edinburgh were standardised to reflect the real-life proportions of rental, share-owned and owner-occupied dwellings.

The full PhD thesis, including a detailed description of the methodology and providing ample theoretical backgrounds to the story of carfree housing in the context of urban sustainability, will be posted on this website and also be available as a hard copy version by mid-2001.

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A short history of carfree housing

Carfree housing is not exactly a new concept. After all, most residential development from the era before mass-motorisation - generally before 1945 - was done without parking provision in mind. While some pre-1945 housing stock, even of medium or higher density, was subsequently retrofitted with garages or ground-level car parks, not infrequently compromising open space quality and/or heritage issues, a substantial supply of parking-free housing remains to this day in all European cities. In Germany and Austria, building codes have required parking provision with residential development since 1939 (see below), with quite rigorous enforcement until recently, though the regulations were not always applied under the productive pressures of the post-war reconstruction period in the 1950s. In Denmark and the Netherlands, urban renewal that required demolition and new construction within old-growth urban fabric was similarly exempted from such rules, in the knowledge that apart from generating formidable extra costs, the ubiquitous provision of parking would rapidly have brought the limited and already congested road networks in pre-industrial or 19th century districts to a standstill.

When the first European carfree housing scheme was proposed in Bremen (Germany) in 1992, the novelty of the concept, thus, lay not so much in putting housing units without car parks on the market. Rather, what appeared radical - and to some, provocative beyond reason - was its blunt defiance of an unspoken consensus that perceived principally every household in the country to aspire to car ownership and with a right to expect that as few institutional, legal, financial or spatial barriers as possible deter from attaining that goal. Carfree living, it was believed, was the choice of fringe groups and had no place in the contemporary mainstream of society. Now suddenly proposals appeared that attempted to not only save the costs associated to developing parking facilities, but simultaneously create residential environments that would reflect the benefits of non-car ownership by being relatively sheltered from the noise, pollution, safety and land-grab impacts of automobile traffic. Or, in other words, making it exceptionally attractive to consolidate a lifestyle regarded as decidedly nonconformist. The struggle most stakeholders have had, and are still having to face when warming up to these ideas cannot be underestimated in a psychological sense.

However, opposition to carfree housing initiatives was easily deconstructed where it claimed that carfree living was a small minority phenomenon. As Reutter and Reutter (1996a, 1996b) found in a seminal study on the demographics, behaviour patterns and motivations of carfree households, the group amounts to an average of 41% of all households in large West German cities, and hovers near the 50% mark in East German urban centres or the European capitals of Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Edinburgh and Vienna. While the proportion of carfree households had declined markedly everywhere after 1945, it now appears to be consolidating at least in these larger cities, assisted by trends towards more single and two-person, young adult and over-65 households, all of which are much less likely to own cars than members of middle-aged or family groups. Carfree living, however, is not absent from the latter population segments either, and the attraction existing carfree housing areas obviously have on households with children (see below and Section 5.6) may be taken as an indication for substantial latent demand here. Moreover, Reutter and Reutter (1996a), in a survey in their native Dortmund (Germany), could establish that far from aspiring to car ownership as soon as circumstances allowed, carfree households were generally quite happy about their choice. 74% of respondents expressed satisfaction with their status of non-car ownership, 75% considered a car unnecessary for their mobility needs, and 92% did not expect to own a car in the foreseeable future (ibid).

There is, then, clearly a market for carfree housing not adequately served by conventional housing development, where cars are generally allowed to penetrate much of the residential environment and where parking facilities are implicitly factored into the cost of each housing unit, regardless of whether buyers or tenants own vehicles or not. Carfree housing is designed to roll back these disincentives to abstention from car ownership. This is done, on one hand, by ending the cross-subsidy enabling car owners to park their vehicles at little or no cost on valuable land - typically, each off-street parking bay requires a minimum floor area or open space of 25 sqm and costs between EUR 10,000 and 30,000 (A$ 17,000 to 50,000) to build. This contributes to more social justice along the 'user pays' principle and to better housing affordability within the carfree market. Explicit costs for parking, of course, can just as well be incorporated in mixed car ownership housing developments, as attempted quite successfully in Freiburg-Vauban and Tübingen. On the other hand, it is usually intended to provide additional benefits to the residents of carfree neighbourhoods - this may range from extra public open space to better technical or ecological building standards, from discounts on mobility services like public transit passes or car sharing to advanced levels of participatory planning and extra community facilities. Ideally, a carfree housing project would:

• integrate frequent public transit service (best as rail),
• include basic shopping and services, or be located in easy walking distance from them,
• be connected to a good cycling network,
• be sheltered from traffic noise and pollution,
• include open space safe enough for kids to play outdoors without supervision and pleasant enough for adults to spontaneously congregate and use as a natural extension to the private dwelling.

In fact, early experiences with the presentation of carfree housing proposals in public debate have sharpened their stakeholders' senses: there is little to be gained from focussing the marketing effort on sophisticated regulatory frameworks concerning vehicle bans and requiring a resident's lifelong commitment to non-car ownership. Instead, it's the positive elements, the 'extras' normally difficult to find in conventional development, which constitute the unique appeal of carfree housing schemes. Dittrich and Klewe (1997) suggest that in defining a carfree neighbourhood,

Entscheidendes Kriterium sollte [...] sein, ob gezielte Angebote an Haushalte ohne (eigenes) Auto gemacht werden, und der Zusammenhang zwischen individuellem Autobesitz/Autonutzung und alternativen Qualitäten sichtbar wird (ibid, p12).

The decisive criterion should be whether a specific offer is made to households without (their own) car, and whether the context between individual car ownership/use and alternative qualities becomes visible.

Hence, carfree housing generally stops short of eliminating all car use in their residents' lives: it is common practice to include a limited number of parking spaces for shared vehicles, supplied by a commercial or in-house car sharing organisation. There is usually some provision made for visitors' cars and while it is aimed to maintain pedestrian-only internal access, it is normally possible to enter the neighbourhood for emergency vehicles or when carrying heavy items. Enforcement of the carfree character of a neighbourhood varies greatly between the built examples, and these differences are reflected in the selection of case studies in this chapter. Generally, a physical, a legal and a demand-responsive approach can be distinguished, with the first forming the basis of the Amsterdam and Edinburgh examples, the second dominating the Hamburg (Saarlandstraße) and Vienna cases and the third prevalent in Freiburg-Vauban and Tübingen (French Quarter).

As described above, the concept of car-free housing indicates a significant break with travel demand management practice in residential development as it was common throughout West Germany during the entire post-war period. The regulation of parking provision with construction projects according to a 'predict and provide' model dates back to the 1930s, when - consistent with nazi motorisation policy - authorities released legal amendments ('Reich Garage Code') which required developers to supply sufficient parking facilities with each new project. After 1945, all West German states introduced similar legislation with their respective building code. Typically, regulations would define minimum numbers of parking bays per residential unit or area of office space, varying reasonably between states, different kinds of businesses or centrality of location. In critical cases, investors can seek exemption from these requirements, but this is usually subject to a cash-in-lieu payment to the municipality (at an amount not exceeding the average construction costs of the equivalent parking space). Funds generated from this source had to be reinvested by municipalities in public parking facilities - though more recently, some states have also enabled their allocation to transport projects not directly associated with automobile parking provision, such as bicycle infrastructure and public transit.

Negotiations between authorities and developers on the number of parking spaces and the collection of cash-in-lieu payments under the Garage Code have become quite common practice in office and commercial development, especially in central city locations where most municipalities actively encourage the limitation of parking space. State building codes largely allow for such flexibility, enabling authorities to declare parking provision above certain limits undesirable in demarcated areas or to assess the parking impact of new development on a case-by-case basis. In practice, however, the scope of these liberties has rarely been made use of in residential development, which is still largely considered unmarketable if under-supplied with car parks, or a burden on its surroundings where drastically increased parking pressure would be anticipated. Hence, parking provision with post-1930s housing is without obvious correspondence to determinants like the standard of public transit or the distance to urban centres. Inner-city infill developments and new housing on the urban fringe often provide similar numbers of parking bays (generally no less than 1.0 per unit), despite their enormous difference in non-car accessibility.

It is this 'philosophy of state regulations' (Dittrich and Klewe 1997) that initially proved one of the most formidable obstacles to the implementation of carfree housing projects. Authorities were simply not prepared to uncouple the firmly wedded issues of residential development and parking provision, and throughout Germany and Austria, it took changes in state building codes to turn the tables in this respect. The state of Hesse, in 1993, delegated the responsibility for parking requirements to the municipalities, some of which have since elaborated more locally adapted schemes (Hoopmann and Volpert 1996, Keipinger 1996). The city-state of Berlin, in 1994, abolished the need for parking provision altogether in certain areas. Hamburg, North Rhine Westfalia, Baden-Württemberg and Wien created special clauses which give explicit recognition to carfree housing schemes and lower parking provision requirements accordingly (down to 0.1 or 0.2 per unit). Simultaneously, though, these codes spell out that responsibility for maintaining the low traffic impact rests with the property owner and demand the maintenance of land reserves for future car park construction or the later payment of cash-in-lieu fees should the carfree concept fail to hold (Dittrich and Klewe 1997, Epp 1997).

There are, however, two sides to the legal situation in consolidating the carfree character of a neighbourhood. As legitimate as it may seem for city authorities to request safety hatches for traffic impact reduction that may fail to materialise in practice, it is not always the users whose behaviour remains the least predictable. Instead, these same users, selecting to move into a carfree neighbourhood for its particular qualities related to the absence of traffic, have understandable claims towards both the developer and the authorities that this character be preserved and not be watered down by retrofitting the neighbourhood with vehicle access and parking at a later stage and probably even demanding financial contributions for this from non-car owners. Contractual relations between residents, developers and authorities, after initially focussing on users' duties alone, now increasingly acknowledge this vital interest and in turn oblige the developer to market exclusively to buyers or tenants who support, and adhere to, the requirements of the mobility management programme (Bellaire 2000). The city's responsibility consists in guaranteeing that its traffic management policies and practice at large remain in keeping with the goals of the carfree or car-reduced concept of the precinct.

On the ground, implementation of carfree housing projects has not been extraordinarily rapid - which is unsurprising, since urban development is inherently a slow-moving process under normal conditions - but a number of schemes did get built in the past half decade. Bremen's original proposal in suburban Hollerland, which had dominated the carfree housing debate throughout Europe for several years, collapsed in 1996 for a host of reasons, the most significant being a slowdown in the regional housing market, and the district's problematic location at a tram line which was yet to be built and no functional sub-centre within walking distance. Instead, a smaller inner-city development (Grünenstraße) was completed in Bremen in 1995 and became a pioneer for formal exemption from parking provision regulations in the residential sector. Amsterdam's GWL-terrein, included as a case study in this volume, was the first large-scale scheme, completed in stages between late 1996 and early 1998. Hamburg's Saarlandstraße, Edinburgh's Slateford Green and Vienna's Autofreie Mustersiedlung Floridsdorf followed in 2000. Freiburg-Vauban and Tübingen's French Quarter are longer-term urban redevelopment programmes targeted at both carfree and car-owning users, with substantial parts inhabited by 2000. Three smaller carfree housing projects (40-60 units) have been implemented in Munich and Kassel, while three larger schemes (200-500 units each) are under preparation in Cologne, Münster and Berlin. There is talk of follow-on projects in Edinburgh and Vienna, and carfree housing philosophy appears to be breaking ground in residential development practice in several London boroughs.

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Amsterdam, GWL-terrein: A carfree public housing project 

In 1993, the Amsterdam borough of Westerpark announced the realisation of a 600-unit car-free housing project. The concept of carfree housing is not entirely new to Amsterdam, as residential redevelopment within the old canal quarters has been quite commonly exempted from parking provision even since 1945 as this was seen as essential to preserve the character and functionality of the pre-industrial city. In the Westerpark project, however, carfree housing was a first to be attempted on such a large scale and in a location outside the old town. At the project's inception, the borough council ran a newspaper ad to inform the public of its plans, resulting in 4,000 serious respondents interested in buying or renting a unit on GWL-terrein. Future residents were asked to sign a non-obligatory declaration of support for the car-free nature of the site. The apartments were completed in stages between late 1996 and early 1998.

The project is located at some 3 km from the city centre at the terminus of an existing tram line and the very edge of the early 20th century city extensions. Thus, the neighbourhood services and community facilities of 'old-growth' urban fabric can be drawn on. It makes use of a 6 hectares site formerly used by the municipal water utility (GWL), which became available after operations could be spatially rationalised. Some of the old buildings were preserved for cultural purposes and local business, and an operational water tower was integrated as a landmark. A mix of owner-occupied and rental apartments - each about 50% of the total - on the former water works site replicated both the building density (100 units per hectare) and the average parking supply (0.2 per unit) typical for the district. The typological pattern, however, consisiting of open five-story terrace blocks and a nearly continuous five- to ten-story perimeter building along the northern and western edges, indicates a clear break from that of the neighbourhood. Nearly all apartments have two or more bedrooms, though there is also a small project of aged persons' flats, housing for disabled children, studio apartments for artists and a housing commune. The low allocation of space for car parks, combined with the inaccessibility of the site to motorised vehicles, enabled an interconnected system of high-quality open spaces penetrating the entire development, with a significantly lower share of impervious surfaces if compared to conventional development.

Apart from its carfree character, the development has various ecological and social features ranging from landscaped rooftops, rainwater use in toilets, a ban on timber from non-sustainable production and a small community centre. Waste is separated into four fractions including green waste and collected in subterranean containers at the perimeter of the site, obliterating the need for collection trucks to enter the carfree interior. There are several small shops and services including an Internet café as well as a large café and restaurant and a TV studio in the old waterworks buildings. A car sharing organisation has various vehicles for hire on site.

The GWL-terrein development integrates very closely with the surrounding turn-of-the-century district: each existing street approaching the site the east or south was extended through the project as a pedestrian walkway and knits the neighbourhood together, while simultaneously generating exciting contrasts due to the radically different urban typologies in either part. Van Hallstraat, an arterial street at the interface of the old and new neighbourhoods, was traffic-calmed in mid-1999 with on-street parking removed, speed reduced, sidewalks widened and the tram terminus rebuilt and extended. As mentioned above, the entire site is inaccessible to motor vehicles including taxis and removal vans; however, 110 parking spaces have been created towards the western verge to cater for an estimated 20% of residents still owning a car. This figure had been established in a survey, and the spaces are allocated in a lottery. Besides the impediment of motorised access, enforcement of the carfree character in GWL-Terrein is administrational: Westerpark streets are controlled by residents-only parking, with GWL dwellers ineligible for permits. Owning a car and parking it somewhere completely different is not restricted, though. However, following the removal of surface parking from a cultural centre drawing visitors from the entire urban region while its grounds are redesigned into a public park, the borough council has approved a 400-bay multi storey parking garage to be built in the vicinity of GWL-Terrein. The facility will also serve the non-residential uses on GWL itself (café-restaurant and TV studio). Spare capacities - if available - will be open for hire by Westerpark residents (with GWL dwellers also entitled, but possibly at a lower priority than those from the old district). Chances are thus that the carfree nature of the project may be somewhat watered down in the future.

View GWL-terrein photo page

Many of the GWL-Terrein inhabitants used to live elsewhere in the district before, owing to a (now discontinued) policy to give preference to local applicants when allocating the units. With its high share of large apartments, GWL-Terrein proved particularly attractive to those who had run out of space in the older buildings (where most apartments are small) by enabling them to remain within their familiar neighbourhood - apartment size was the most popular reason given when we asked residents about their motives for moving to GWL-terrein. Such, the carfree concept is also connected to the borough's desire to cater for better-off residents and family households - Westerpark currently has the lowest per-capita income of all Amsterdam boroughs. There are no schools or kindergartens on the site as the existing ones around had spare capacity, following a long decline in the number of children in Westerpark in favour of one- and two-adult households.

An artificial canal with a café and TV studio in the former machinery building along its banks effectively divides the development into two parts. To the north, there is an urban square with some shops and surrounded by the ten-story apartment block, which is fully owner-occupied. To the south, the site is more garden-oriented, with the terrace blocks in mixed tenure and the perimeter block as rental housing. We repeatedly came across residents who were happy to let their young kids roam freely within their section but did not allow them to cross the canal on their own. There appear to be quite distinctive social milieux on either side as well. To our impression, most idealistic supporters of the carfree concept - at the same time those residents who do what they can to - can be found in the terraces in the southern half: one third of residents gave the carfree concept as a decisive reason for moving to GWL-terrein. These are the people who simultaneously afford time and energy to cultivate a sense of place and a rich community life. It is also this group we heard most complaints from that there is still too much traffic impact on the site, particularly noise (the penetration of which is probably facilitated by the open building pattern) and that more should be done to 'get the cars out'. The northern half, however, is where many of the remaining car owners live (and at 38% of households, their number is somewhat larger than what the parking supply suggests!). A sizeable share of these people were attracted to the site by the prospect of relatively affordable home ownership near the centre of Amsterdam, while the carfree character of GWL-terrein is sometimes more of a source of discomfort ('there's not enough parking here'). We also encountered a concentration of a third group, those who do not own a car largely for practical reasons and thus found GWL terrein an appropriate concept, within the rental perimeter block in the southern half.

The populace here is quite middle-aged: 90% of heads of households are between 31 and 60, indicating an under-representation of young adults and seniors. The majority of GWL-terrein households are adult-only: only 42% of households include children under 18 years. This is well above the Amsterdam average of some 24% and as such an indication for the child-friendliness of the neighbourhood; however, the number of children in all other case study areas is considerably higher. Similarly, average household sizes and their distribution show a bias towards larger households for Amsterdam conditions (where nearly 80% of all households consist of one or two persons) but slightly below-average figures in comparison to our carfree housing sample. Households without an independent income constitute a very marginal group - we only came across one out of a sample of 48 - and slightly more than half use their home as a base for gainful work at least occasionally. Most residents appear to work in professions requiring high qualifications, and a substantial number can be classified as part-takers of what is often termed the 'global knowledge economy'.

View GWL-terrein demographic data

Travel patterns in GWL terrein are a constant reminder that Amsterdam is anything but a stand-alone city: in fact, it forms part of a large regional agglomeration known as Randstad Holland and stretching as far as Den Haag, Rotterdam, Utrecht and Amersfoort. This becomes extremely obvious in commuting patterns with an average journey to work or school of 15.7 km, with 19% of these trips being further than 25 km and thus clearly having another city as their destination. The fact that GWL-terrein is located at a mere 2.5 km from Amsterdam's central station renders this observation both paradox and explainable, since it is this very centrality of location that offers convenient access to an enormous job market both within Amsterdam proper and throughout the Randstad.

Simultaneously, however, the legendary importance of the bicycle in Amsterdam becomes conspicuous with the highest ownership rate of all case studies in this volume at 4 bikes per 3 residents, and a share of non-motorised trips of 73%. The 2-6 km distance bracket in particular, representing most destinations outside Westerpark borough but still within inner Amsterdam, and accounting for 42% of all trips (50% of trips to work and school), benefits strongly from the ubiquity of this mode. Despite the share of public transit being rather moderate at 149 trips per person and year, no less than 39% of residents hold a periodical travel pass, which can be regarded as another indicator for the significance of long-distance commuting done on a regular basis and largely by regional rail. 10% of households have signed membership for car sharing which provides several vehicles on-site. The total distance travelled per person and year is relatively high at nearly 17,000 km, both regarding regional and international travel - following, once again, the occurrence of long-distance commuting as well as the importance of regular business trips in the professional groups resident in GWL-terrein, and the popularity - and affordability - of holiday trips to destinations outside the Netherlands.

As mentioned, the number of cars is higher than expected at 1 per 5.8 inhabitants (down, however, from 1 per 5.2 at the time of moving in). Most cars, however, do not seem to be used too frequently at 10 weekly passenger trips per on-site vehicle - out of the sample of carfree housing case studies, only Hamburg's Stadthaus Schlump has an even lower figure. Hence, we came across no more than one household out of 48 that would fit the description of a car-dominated lifestyle (over 50% of all trips by car), whereas 57% of households, a share surpassed only in Vienna's Autofreier Mustersiedlung Floridsdorf, live practically carfree (less than 10% of all trips by car).

View GWL-terrein mobility data

While the borough council of Westerpark may not be too comfortable with the notion that their hard-won decision to limit parking supply has resulted in a considerable demand surplus, this doesn't automatically put the carfree concept of the project to discredit. A 62% share of non-car owning households in a development designed to attract the better-off into what is effectively Amsterdam's lowest-income borough or to keep them from moving away to improve social diversity, still constitutes a remarkable figure, even under the quite special circumstances of the Dutch capital. What would the mobility patterns of these people look like had they settled in suburban locations instead? And would the quality of the local environment, and the interaction of the community, particularly in the part of the development where these are strongest, be the same if GWL-terrein had been supplied with ample vehicle access and parking? On the other hand, there has been substantial controversy in the district over precisely this kind of redevelopment, since many locals do question the need for a policy that aims at enriching the quarter by attracting the wealthy while simultaneously not doing enough to consolidate the livelihoods of lower-income households. Some of this debate has, in the past, included polemic conclusions about the ineffectiveness of the carfree concept. We can now supply figures that do indeed support the view that GWL-terrein residents' cars - approximately 120 of them - cannot be accommodated on-site and may have an impact on the neighbourhood. A household's arrangements with car ownership in the absence of a parking space, however, can have many faces, not all of which necessarily provide additional burdens on their surroundings. We did not ask this question in our survey but we still heard of a number of individual solutions, explicitly and through rumours. The following is a sample:

• Residents own cars but store them at a parking facility outside GWL-terrein. In the most informal of cases, they are simply parked at a friend's or relative's place. Alternatively, some residents have access to free or inexpensive parking at their workplace and operate their vehicle from there. Still others commercially rent a garage space somewhere. Access to these vehicles, in all these cases, requires what mostly boils down to a bike trip, but this is probably regarded as acceptable since, as mentioned, the majority of GWL-terrein car owners appear to use their vehicles for special occasions rather than regular trips.
• A variation on the friends and relatives solution is informal car sharing, where a household from within the carfree development shares a vehicle with another household from without, such circumventing the administrative restrictions on parking licensing (in Amsterdam) or outright vehicle ownership (in Vienna and Freiburg). We encountered this model in GWL terrein and in every other case study of this survey.
• A variation on the workplace arrangement is the company car, which spends weekdays at the work site (and may be used for business trips out of there) but is then used for private trips at weekends and during holidays and spends those times near the home.
• Westerpark, like all of inner Amsterdam and even some middle suburbs, nominally has resident-only parking permits for all on-street parking. Non-licence holders - including GWL-terrein residents who do not qualify due to the carfree concept of their neighbourhood - pay an hourly charge, which is prohibitively expensive for regular users, and enforcement is quite strict. We are, however, under the impression that some GWL-terrein vehicle owners managed to get a local parking licence nonetheless through informal avenues - how exactly can only be left to speculation, but the above models may offer some tentative clues.

There is no shortage of both domestic and international visitors to GWL-Terrein who praise the scheme, but there haven't been any follow-on carfree housing projects yet in Amsterdam or elsewhere in the Netherlands. Even in Westerpark itself, new housing proposals have returned to conventional parking management, while the councillors and planners whose support had been very crucial to GWL-terrein no longer work in their positions - leaving the carfree idea devoid of determined political and administrative backing.

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Edinburgh, Slateford Green: A mixed-tenure carfree development

Edinburgh's 120-unit carfree housing scheme on the 1.6 ha site of a former railway goods yard in the inner suburb of Gorgie, some 3.5 km west of the city centre, was completed in stages between late 1999 and mid-2000. More than in any of the other examples, Edinburgh's carfree housing project plays a prominent role in a city-wide approach to transport policy. As one of the first cities in the UK, Edinburgh turned to sustainable transport objectives when it became clear that there was no way to aim at a high-capacity inner city road network to ease congestion without fundamentally threatening the unique, UNESCO-listed historic centre of the town. Such, Edinburgh does not have an inner city ring road or radial freeways like so many of its UK (and Continental) counterparts, but faces the challenge to decongest its streets as they are. This is pursued on many fronts, such as the designation of highly visible bus priority routes along certain corridors (greenways), the introduction of a cycling network and the successive application of bike-friendly road layouts, pedestrianisation in the central area, and behavioural incentives such as start-up support for Britain's first car share scheme (operated since early 1999 by BudgetCar). Following the inspiration from Continental cities and Edinburgh's membership in the CarFree Cities Network, the creation of a carfree housing demonstration project was strongly supported by council, and subsequently realised in co-operation with Canmore Housing Association, a fast-growing residential developer currently managing some 2,000 housing units for rent or in shared ownership throughout the Edinburgh region. The projects aims to assess whether housing provision for people without cars will prove a viable concept economically - with different incomes as target groups - and whether it will foster and consolidate sustainable lifestyles in the city particularly with regard to car ownership which, over the past 15 years, has been growing at a faster rate than national average, though there are still over 45% of carfree households (Hazel 1998).

Unlike the other carfree housing examples, there is little to no regulation concerning car ownership in real terms in Slateford Green. The developer informed prospective tenants of the carfree character and has powers to enforce that no vehicles be parked on the site by what in the UK is termed a Section 75 agreement (specifying additional clauses to a sale or lease contract of property). There is no on-street parking management or pricing in the vicinity either, though the council has announced that it will introduce it - grudgingly, as they see it as a costly burden - should there be problems with carfree residents' vehicles being parked in the neighbourhood. Road access to the area, however, is limited, which was a paramount reason to select the site for a carfree demonstration project in the first place. Two prioritised and high-frequency bus routes (greenways, see above) are within a few minutes' walk, while an orbital freight railway line runs right along its limits and features in the council's long term transport strategy as a future passenger link. As a modest downfall to a traffic-free residential environment, the past 10 years have seen the development of both a supermarket surrounded by a parking lot and a drive-through fast-food outlet adjacent to the site - on the other hand, they provide important local retail facilities, of course, and can just as easily be reached on foot. Primary and secondary schools are each about a kilometre away.

Among Slateford Green's 120 apartments, 26 are owner-occupied, 25 in shared ownership, 55 are rental with social housing subsidies by Scottish Homes, a National Government agency, and 14 form part of a staffed disability housing scheme run by the Deaf Society. All types of ownership are scattered throughout the development, as are unit sizes (though there are more large apartments in shared ownership and more single-person ones in the rental sector). As mentioned before, the diversity of tenure forms has partly been devised to test the acceptance of carfree housing in different market segments, and as of September 2000, the rental and share-owned sections were almost fully occupied - Canmore had a well-kept waiting list for rentals and pointed out that only 17% of households on it actually owned a car anyway, so they never saw Slateford Green at a disadvantage here. Out of the owner-occupied units, however, some 20 were still vacant at the time of the survey and marketing continued to move slowly until the end of the year. The housing society is now contemplating the conversion of unsold units into shared ownership, a tenure form that proved highly successful, and/or their lease at market rates.

The buildings are grouped around an oval courtyard, at a variable height of two to four storeys. The basic construction is a timber frame, and most materials have been selected to minimise environmental impact, maintenance requirements and wastage at demolition. There are glass conservatories for passive solar energy use. Insulation is made from recycled newspapers. Heating is from a purpose-built district heating system, which uses condensate from a nearby distillery, available at extremely low cost. Greywater is treated on-site in a wetland system, and rainwater is collected and made available for garden watering. There are provisions for photovoltaic panels, but it was decided that this technology is not advanced and inexpensive enough yet to be included at this stage.

View Slateford Green photo page

The community delivers an image of fragmentation to some extent: many respondents would contend that neighbourhood interaction was still in its infancy, though they expected this to improve over time. Slateford Green has a multi-purpose community room, which is beginning to see regular neighbourhood activities, and a resident concierge as a facilitator. Appropriation of the open spaces, however, appears to be mainly an activity of children. The relative absence of adults here may be attributable to the lack of garden space residents could design and vegetate to their own needs - a characteristic that lends Slateford Green an appearance that is markedly distinct from all the other case studies.

Most inhabitants are rather young - almost 80% of heads of households are 45 and under, though there is also a notable share of seniors. The majority of households include children, more often than not in single-parent families. Average household sizes and their distribution are quite similar to the other case studies in our carfree housing sample, with an emphasis on larger households which is likely to be above the Edinburgh average.

About 40% of households are without an independent income (ie. within full-time education, pensioners or unemployed), and only 17% use their home as a base for gainful work.

A few issues in the field of ecological behaviour are somewhat remarkable. A very high number of residents - 85% and 58% of respondents respectively - claim to be concerned about conservation of heat and water (and are quite fond of living in a well-insulated building that minimises heating needs). There also seems to be a well-developed recycling culture in terms of furniture and other reusable items (65% of respondents), but it breaks down completely when in comes to recycling of waste materials. A mere 27% of households separate glass and paper, and I could not find one trying their luck with a composting scheme.

An important reason for this, of course, is the lack of collection facilities conveniently accessible from the houses. The city of Edinburgh does run a network of recycling containers, but they are few and far between; and options for handling organic waste are practically non-existent, since (as hinted above) even the private gardens allocated to ground-floor apartments do not offer any space for this. There is clearly scope for improvement here, and negotiations are currently under way between the housing society and local authorities about the on-site placement of appropriate facilities.

View Slateford Green demographic data

Like most places, Edinburgh has its fair share of urban fringe retail centres, business parks and entertainment facilities. But in its essence it still appears a highly contained city with a strong CBD (in every functional respect) and rather weak regional interlinkages. The CBD has been subject to a gradual traffic calming and bus priority programme for some years, offers very limited parking and is generally regarded as difficult to access for cars. Such, it is not too surprising that the average journey to work or school distance of Slateford Green residents is precisely that to the city centre (3.6 km), and that public transit has a very strong position in the respondents' mobility. There are 315 annual trips per head despite the absence of an urban rail system (the bus network, however, offers extremely frequent and convenient services to the centre and a multitude of other destinations), amounting to one third of all trips (46% of trips to work and school). Yet, only 13% of residents hold a monthly or annual public transit pass, which can probably be explained from the lack of fare integration in Edinburgh's deregulated public transit market, and the availability of quite inexpensive off-peak single or day tickets.

The high level of containment of activities within Edinburgh is also supported by Slateford Green residents' low amount of annual travel, measured by distance, which is less than 9,000 km per person and thus far below the figure in any other carfree case study area. This applies to both trips within the region and to trips to destinations outside of it.

While Edinburgh's city council has obviously gone through lengths to provide some bicycle infrastructure and generally improve road conditions for cycling, bike use in Slateford Green continues to appear largely an occupation for the children's generation. The share of non-motorised trips (51% of all trips) is the second lowest in the in the carfree housing sample after Vienna's Autofreier Mustersiedlung Floridsdorf, despite a highly conducive distribution of trip lengths (the average trip of a Slateford Green resident merely covers 4.3 km of distance, and no more than 13% of all trips are further than 6 km). Statistically, less than every other resident owns a bicycle - which is a substantially lower rate than in any other case study area - accompanied by a conspicuous lack of adequate bike parking facilities within the development even for the few that exist.

In the absence of a policy to actively ban car ownership among residents as long as vehicles are not parked on the site, one would expect a certain share of car owners much like in pre-WWII housing development where comparable conditions prevail. In Slateford Green, this applies to 26% of households - the second lowest figure in our carfree housing sample - which brings the number of vehicles to 1 per 8.8 residents, representing a decrease from 1 per 7.0 since before moving in. Those cars that do exist, however, are used quite intensively: each of them caters for no less than 25 passenger trips per week, substantially more than in any other case study of our carfree housing sample. There are two car sharing vehicles on the site, but their user group remains very limited (4% of households) despite there being an offer to owner-occupiers for three years of free membership. All up, 54% of all households lead a practically carfree lifestyle (less than 10% of all trips), while there is a minority of 12% of households whose travel patterns are dominated by car use (more than 50% of all trips).

View Slateford Green mobility data

There appears to be a sizeable minority of residents who support the carfree concept idealistically, particularly in the share-owned sector, while the majority of non-car owners appear to make this choice chiefly for convenience and/or financial reasons. There have been some shifts in car ownership during tenure, both people selling cars and people buying them (though the first group, as hinted above, is larger). Whether the existence of a small minority of residents with car-dominated lifestyles in an otherwise carfree housing project constitutes a source of concern, or further adds to the fragmentation of the community, is probably a question best resolved among the residents themselves. To our impression, however, Slateford Green residents display not nearly as much concern about unaccounted car ownership in their midst as their counterparts in the Freiburg, Vienna or Amsterdam case studies - but then, identification with the place and its wellbeing is only in its early stages.

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Hamburg, Stadthaus Schlump: A developer model for mobility management

The concept for this small project converting a former hospital to some 45 residential units in Hamburg's inner suburb of Eimsbüttel resulted from a developer competition in the mid-1990s, called for by the city to encourage innovative solutions for the reuse of a heritage-listed former hospital ensemble. The Celle-based team Gessner and Raap won the competition on a mixed-use concept with live-work arrangements, the sympathetic introduction of environmental technologies and community facilities, and a travel management model based on neighbourhood car sharing and free public transit passes in exchange for a substantial reduction in parking provision (down to under 0.5 per household). In short, the developers were determined to deliver a residential community with some exceptional qualities in return for demanding market-rate rents (which are substantial in that part of town at a net rent of DM 20 (A$ 16.50) per sqm and month), not least on the background of a slowly relaxing rental market in Hamburg. As the only source of public funding, a tax break from the heritage office became available for preserving the character of the existing buildings, some of which date back to the 1870s, and the courtyard, which is characterised by a number of old trees.

Two micro-plants for combined heat and power generation make the development independent of urban utilities; instead, there are photovoltaic panels on one roof which feed back into the grid. Rainwater is used in toilets. A number of community facilities are included, such as a sauna, a solarium, a sports studio and a guest room which can be rented at a nightly cost of DM 49 (A$ 40), though there is no indoor multi-purpose space open for appropriation by residents' initiatives. There are also some non-residential facilities, most prominently a café, which faces the street and is open to the general public but has become much of a meeting place for the residents. There is a small kindergarten and a non-profit supplier of leftover restaurant meals for the homeless, while a physiotherapy studio is a remnant of the former hospital use. Two staffed flats for the mentally handicapped, also stemming from the ensemble's former incarnation, were discontinued in mid-1999 to make way for an internet company and a few additional housing units.

What makes Stadthaus Schlump interesting in the carfree context is the fact that this is one of the first eco-housing projects where mobility structures and behaviour are consciously addressed. The limited size and heritage character of the site did not allow for more than 20 car parks, which is about 30 short of normal requirements. In fact, the residential use resulted in a net decrease of parking supply when compared to the former hospital (which apparently used part of the interior courtyard as car parks). Instead, the developers negotiated a contract with Volkswagen to go halves in the provision of five car sharing vehicles and their administrational support (computers and working hours). Cars could be hired without advance reservation at a flat rate of 6 to 8 DM per hour (A$ 5 to 6.50) with no additional per-km charge. It seems that prior to January 2000, when the mobility concept was changed (see below) both car-owning and carfree households - about 60-70 persons in total - made use of the offer, though it became clear that one car was surplus to requirements, resulting in its withdrawal. The remaining 15 car parks are privately rented to residents, with demand fluctuating and not always meeting supply. There is also a possibility to park cars on-street, where the situation - in immediate vicinity of a district centre and Hamburg's largest university campus - is tight, but remains largely free of charge and without a resident-only permit scheme.

Additionally, a deal was made with the Metropolitan Transit Association (HVV) to supply annual public transit passes similar to their JobTicket programme which were supplied to all residents as part of the rent, without extra charge. Finally, there are a few communal bikes for rent at DM 1 (A$ 0.80) per hour.

Lamentably, it can be traced that since completion of the project in 1996, enthusiasm for these innovations has waned a bit with both owners and residents of the project, at least where they require continuous effort to show their benefits. As a result of what appears to be an executive decision on the landlord's behalf with little or no consultation of the tenants, the pricing regime of the shared facilities was changed as of January 2000. The use of car sharing vehicles, the public transit pass and access to the sauna, solarium and fitness studio must now be paid for separately as a monthly package of DM 40 (A$ 33) per household (in addition, there was a hefty price hike of up to 50% in car sharing per-hour charges). While this is certainly no unreasonable cost even for any one of these benefits, participation has dropped very considerably, by more than half in the case of the car sharing vehicles, now spurring an internal debate to abandon the scheme altogether or to incorporate it with a city-wide car sharing supplier like StattAuto.

View Stadthaus Schlump photo page

While most residents can be characterised as members of the higher-income spectrum, there is neither mystery nor euphemism with either tenants or landlord that the rents in Stadthaus Schlump are scraping the upper limit of what is acceptable for housing in that part of Hamburg. And while the owners are, in principle, committed to deliver in return, there is also a widespread expectation with the residents not only with regard to superior housing quality, but also with regard to tension-free intra-community and tenant-landlord relationships - a claim which cannot always be fulfilled and has led to frustration with a tangible minority of residents. The relatively poor uptake of transport and common facilities since the introduction of explicit pricing is likely to be connected to this. While the organisation of the project as traditional rental properties probably proved the most viable option to the developers at the point of inception, it may be questionable whether this tenure form is in the best long-term interest of the attractive living and working environment that is Stadthaus Schlump's strongest marketing asset. Conflicts on difficult decision making processes, now prone to leave the residents disempowered and overrun, could be ameliorated substantially if residents had outright responsibility for a tenable outcome as owner-occupiers, or at least - probably more pragmatic - enjoy institutionalised involvement in such processes within a model of shared ownership. Both these alternatives would be within financial reach of most, if not all present tenants, though a transformation of tenure along these lines does currently not appear on anyone's agenda.

There is a good mix of household forms in the development - we found singles and couples of different ages, single-parent households, nuclear families and shared households, reflecting the greatly varying unit sizes available. Annual turnover has been around 10% per year, which indicates a fairly stable core community, though there was a remarkable number of respondents who admitted they were considering alternatives in the wake of the aforementioned conflicts and frustrations. Stadthaus Schlump clearly is an attractive place for raising children, who occur in every other household - which is unusual for inner Eimsbüttel - with a quite substantial number of them having been born during the tenancy (read under four years old). Accordingly, and much like in every other case study in the carfree housing sample, the 31-45 age brackets conspicuously dominates the adult community. In fact, the quality of the local environment, and in particular its child-friendliness, was the reason most respondents gave for selecting Stadthaus Schlump as their residence. Also high on the list is its convenient location regarding access to schools - which the children are able to reach independently throughout - workplaces and other destinations, and the explicit concept to integrate workplaces with housing. 58% of households - the highest figure in the carfree housing sample - make use of this and use their home as a base for gainful work. Many professionals work in the media industry, which is Hamburg's predominant 'New Economy' sector - as journalists, film technicians or in supporting services. We did not find a single household without an independent income - given the cost of housing in Stadthaus Schlump, this is hardly surprising, since this effectively precludes the lower reaches of the income spectrum.

Use of community facilities and neighbourhood interaction are remarkably strong - on pleasant days during summer, the courtyard, which nearly all apartments face onto, becomes a bustling centre of intensive socialising. Ecological behaviour in the household is very widespread - especially the recycling culture is almost ubiquitous - and despite the occasional quarrels and disappointments, the particular concept of Stadthaus Schlump remains supported by some two thirds of inhabitants.

View Stadthaus Schlump demographic data

Despite numerous incentives towards more sustainable travel behaviour - and notwithstanding their somewhat uncertain future - there have never been any formal restrictions at Stadthaus Schlump concerning car ownership other than the limited supply of on-site parking in a neighbourhood where the on-street parking situation is somewhat precarious. Such, it is not altogether surprising to learn that real-life car ownership (at 1 vehicle per 2 inhabitants) is slightly above state average (1 per 2.1) and quite significantly above the average in inner Eimsbüttel (1 per 2.8), and that the percentage of carfree households hovers around a rather unimpressive 25%. This is, however, all the more remarkable when considering activity and trip patterns, almost 90% of which are within a 6 km range (read bicycle distance). With Stadthaus Schlump's live-work arrangements, regular commuting is the exception rather than the rule. Added to the parking pressure in the area - many tenants rely on on-street parking due to the restrictions on the site - and the cost of vehicle ownership on top of already substantial housing costs, these people should, according to the textbook, be an ideal target group for car sharing. And indeed, the majority of households (63%) participate in the on-site car sharing scheme - yet, this does not appear to have a tangible effect in reducing car ownership. Some respondents contended that the on-site car sharing scheme in the neighbourhood is not user-friendly enough. As an example, vehicles are charged by hour rather than by distance, which makes their use prohibitively expensive for, say, film crew members accessing remote shooting locations or journalists visiting interview partners (these examples are genuine) and there clearly is scope for improvement here.

That having said, there has been a modest drop in car ownership during tenure - contrary to recent city-wide trends - which may continue if the intentions of some interviewees are to be believed. The site is surrounded by retail and service facilities that are made use of extensively, bringing up the non-motorised modal share to 58% of all trips. Cars account for 24% of all trips, despite the high ownership rate this is dramatically below the average modal share for cars in Hamburg (45%/1990), suggesting that Stadthaus Schlump's extensive vehicle fleet is not actually made much use of. Each private car serves a meagre 7 weekly passenger trips on average, by far the lowest figure of all case studies in this sample, and only 21% of households fit the description of a car-dominated mobility pattern (more than 50% of all trips by car). 25% of households - precisely the group without a vehicle of their own - lead largely carfree lifestyles (less than 10% of all trips by car). Public transit use at 134 trips per person and year, however, also falls behind the city average (206/1995), despite some 40% of residents continuing to hold an annual travel pass (which, as mentioned, is available extremely cheaply as a fringe benefit for Stadthaus Schlump tenants). The obliteration of the need to commute to work on a regular basis in favour of a regime of more sporadic work-related trips to varying destinations becomes very obvious in these figures. Despite full employment, Stadthaus Schlump residents take an average of less than three return trips to work or school outside the neighbourhood during a normal week, considerably fewer than in all other case study areas where this figure is between 3.8 and 4.6.

A share of 7% of all regional trips further than 25 km indicates the occurrence of out-of town destinations in the residents' travel patterns on a not too infrequent basis. As detailed above, these are mostly irregular or one-off schedules rather than daily commutes. They bring up the total distance travelled regionally per person and year to a similar level with Amsterdam's GWL-terrein, clearly leading the carfree housing sample. But Stadthaus Schlump's travel intensity seriously jumps off the graph when considering interregional and holiday trips: we came across a substantial number of households for whom international, even overseas business trips in particular are a monthly or yet more frequent modus vivendi. The average Stadthaus Schlump resident takes no less than ten air trips per year, and total distance travelled annually reaches a staggering 34,000 km per person - twice as much as the runner-up (Amsterdam) and almost four times as much as the least travel-intensive case study (Edinburgh).

View Stadthaus Schlump mobility data

Stadthaus Schlump's mobility behaviour profile is instructive in various regards. We are clearly dealing with an unconventional setup of working conditions here, but these simultaneously reveal the finding that live-work arrangements do not necessarily entail lifestyles of less travel intensity. In contrast, they often make travel patterns less predictable and less susceptible to conventional solutions like shifting to public transit, cycling or walking, or making use of car sharing. Many Stadthaus Schlump households appear to cling to car ownership despite not too favourable conditions for accommodating their vehicles and despite the presence of more than reasonable alternatives, because they perceive that they depend on a private car's added flexibility for occasional, infrequent trips in all purpose segments: work-related, shopping and leisure. This is not to say that Stadthaus Schlump's mobility management concept was missing its targets. In fact, 50% of respondents confirmed that their travel behaviour had changed since moving in, and most would attribute this chiefly to the easy accessibility of retail, service and business-support facilities in the vicinity. This locational advantage enables them to do most of their errands by walking and cycling and is generally seen as an essential qualitative edge of Stadthaus Schlump, even compared to other inner urban locations in Hamburg.

Yet, there is a vital interest that Stadthaus Schlump's car ownership rate be below average, not least from the district authority who once dealt out a permit for reduced parking provision based on precisely that assumption. In this regard, Stadthaus Schlump's mobility management concept has not been successful and raises serious questions about the viability of an approach exclusively based on the supply of mobility services - which, moreover, makes many users have second thoughts about whether they really need them when asked even for a modest financial contribution - without as much as an attempt to regulate demand. The current climate in Stadthaus Schlump appears to render concerted action in this field a bit unlikely, but then, the shortfalls do not rest with the developer and the residents alone. The city's role, too, could be more proactive, for instance by responding to a long-standing local demand to introduce resident-only parking controls in the university district. And would Stadthaus Schlump's stakeholders remain as complacent as they are about excessive car ownership, had the city demanded similar guarantees for reduced parking needs - and penalties in case of violation - as it did a few years later in the Saarlandstraße project? We will revisit this topic in the following two examples.

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Vienna, Autofreie Mustersiedlung Floridsdorf: A carfree demonstration project

The first carfree housing project in Austria traces back to the initiative of Christoph Chorherr, a developer and green councillor, in 1993. Vienna has some of the most extensive pre-war housing stock in Europe with the associated densities and limited road infrastructure resulting in rapidly increasing traffic congestion despite the prominance of mostly carfree travel patterns with a large number of city dwellers. Vienna is also the world's largest residential landlord, looking back onto 80 years of social housing policy under the auspices of a socialist-dominated municipal government. Yet, a parking requirement of one space per new housing unit introduced in the 1930s remains in place. Of its substantial investment in renewing and extending its housing stock, the city spends an annual Ö$ 500 million (A$ 59 million) on the production of residential parking facilities alone, largely in an intense urban environment where there is little choice but for costly underground garages - at up to Ö$ 300,000 (A$ 35,000) per bay (Chorherr 1996).

The carfree housing proposal had to overcome a number of legal and political obstacles within the government bureaucracy and the general public. A local councillor, while debating the project in the context of an all-women housing co-operative nearby, commented how he could 'easily imagine a neighbourhood without men, but not one without cars'. The building code was, after lengthy negotiations, amended to allow exemption from the parking provision requirements at the city's discretion where public transit access is superior. A steering group was set up, involving all relevant government departments. This culture of communication was also handed down to the later residents, who were given the opportunity to participate extensively in the planning process: assisted by a flexible design pattern, they were enabled to determine much of the character and layout of their new dwelling.

Besides the carfree nature of the development, which is mainly a recognition of and conscious offer to the residents' lifestyles, the project also addresses the needs and benefits of a strong local community, and goes a long way to meet latest standards and innovation in resource and energy efficiency. Extensive community facilities include a childcare centre, a shopping co-operative, an internet cafe, a public laundry, a bike workshop and playgrounds. All are expected to be managed by groups of users themselves, facilitated by the ample opportunities residents enjoy to get to know each other and work together during the participation process. Despite its formidable net density of some 200 units per hectare - not unlike that in Vienna's pre-war housing districts - the 6-storey buildings have been orientated to enable direct insolation including to the ground floors and feature active (hot water) and passive solar energy use. A heat recycling unit makes use of wastewater heat and can also switch to a cooling system in summer. Greywater is then treated on-site to be re-used in the toilets. District heating supports the renewable systems when needed. A photovoltaic station supplies energy for electric car sharing vehicles (which, however, are yet to appear on the site). All building materials have been selected on the basis of environmental auditing. The open space has a maximum share of soft surfaces, is landscaped in native vegetation and features a small wetland. Rooftops are accessible for community use, and an adjacent undeveloped site has been preserved and converted into a public park overshadowed by tall trees, which serves as an entrée between the tram stop and the buildings and is used intensively as a meeting point for both children and adults. This innovative program is largely financed from a saving of Ö$ 22 million (A$ 2.6 million), about 9% of the total budget, by slashing the parking facilities from 250 to 25 bays. These remaining car parks will be used exclusively by car sharing vehicles. In addition, there will be parking for 400 bicycles.

Tenants are obliged to abstain from vehicle ownership by an article in their lease. However, tenancy law in Austria does not permit eviction in the case of violation. As of October 2000, there hasn't been a need for enforcement yet, but instruments can include the withdrawal of housing subsidies or a forced apartment swap, should a tenant insist to stick to car ownership. Should the carfree character of the project become undermined by a substantial number of residents, the city can resort to an undeveloped site in the vicinity to build a car park - at the cost of the vehicle owners, of course (Rottenberg 1998). Since the funding arrangement for the development enables residents to purchase their apartments 10 years after completion, a legal loophole may emerge then, however, since legal powers to tie access to housing with abstention from car ownership currently only extend to rental situations, nor owner occupation.

Floridsdorf, the inner suburb where the project is located at a distance of some 9 km from the city centre, is situated on the eastern side of the Danube river and is a rather heterogeneous conglomeration of housing of various ages and densities, mixed-use suburban centres, manufacturing industry, new business parks, market gardens, a university campus, allotment gardens and the popular parkland around the lakes at Alte Donau. It carries a slight stigma of being on 'the wrong side of the river' ('Transdanubien') which to many Viennese is a psychological barrier - a fact that can be certain to narrow significantly the market potential of new housing there. Yet, a lot of residential development is occurring, not least because a large number of lots become available for redevelopment on a regular basis in this fast-changing urban district.

Floridsdorf's centre is a metro interchange with fast and frequent service to the CBD and the western inner suburbs, while the carfree site, at 1 km distance, is accessible by a short bike ride or via an orbital tram line, which also connects to another metro terminus in Kagran further south-east. It is not a first-class location to public transit for Vienna circumstances, and there clearly are parts of Vienna more suitable for a carfree housing project - but the initiators preferred a demonstration project on the ground by 2000 to a long wait until 2010 that would have been likely if availability of an inner urban site near a metro station had been made conditional. In October 2000 - ten months after completion - some 90% of the apartments were inhabited. The slowness can probably be attributed both to a overall slump in the local housing market and to the specific difficulties to market such a special concept in a part of town which is not generally perceived as the most conducive for carfree living.

View AM Floridsdorf photo page

Community life is quite strong, given that a substantial number of residents got to know each other as early as during the planning stage and given that a number of facilities are under the self-administration of the residents. In fact, almost 30% of respondents named the special quality of the neighbourhood community (or their expectation of such) as a determining reason for choosing to move to the site. There is a party room and rooftop terrace in one building, an assembly hall and a number of workshops (bicycles, carpentry etc) in a basement facing a lowered square, and a number of rooftop gardens that residents can rent for a nominal fee to grow herbs and vegetables (over one third of respondents make use of this). A sauna and exercise room round off the picture. A youth facility, however, was recently closed after the attempts at self-administration through the teenagers had culminated in a fire.

The populace in Autofreie Mustersiedlung Floridsdorf is relatively young - roughly three quarters of heads of households are 45 and under. Like in most carfree housing areas, there are many children under 18 (in over 60% of all households), reflected by a higher than average representation of larger households (almost half of the units have three or more inhabitants). A large majority (92% of households) has an independent income, and 39% do some or all of their gainful work in the home. Professions, and accordingly incomes, appear quite varied, though the regulations of subsidised housing exclude the higher income brackets.

View AM Floridsdorf demographic data

Autofreie Mustersiedlung Floridsdorf is the only strictly carfree housing project in this survey, and we were most interested whether this concepts does indeed translate into absolute carfree-ness on the ground. The answer is - yes, mostly: there is a remainder of 8% of households still owning cars - extrapolated to the entire development, this amounts to about 20 private vehicles at this rate. That having said, the use of these cars (and the car sharing vehicles) amounts to a marginal 5% of all trips made by residents of the site, and there is not one household whose travel patterns are car-dominated (more than 50% of all trips by car). Nine out of ten households, in turn, lead a virtually carfree lifestyle (less than 10% of all trips by car). Car ownership has dramatically decreased since before residents moved in, from an already low 1 per 10.4 people to 1 per 27.8 people. Clearly, the project attracted households that were already carfree and, to a smaller degree, those committed to give it a try. Over half of all respondents suggested that the carfree character of the Floridsdorf project was a deciding reason to move there, more than in any other case study, even Freiburg-Vauban. On the other hand, car sharing membership is very substantial at 57% (residents were offered free membership for the first year upon moving in and many obviously jumped at the chance). When the car sharing supplier recently made a snap decision to withdraw four out of an original eight vehicles from the site, including the van that many had used extensively for moving-in related trips, there was an understandable outcry. (Similar outrage occurred when the first heating bills arrived and residents had to discover that the supplier's fare policy, consisting of hefty base charges and rather moderate consumption-related charges, offered very little incentive for heat-saving behaviour, let alone a return on the high insulation standards of the buildings).

Travel patterns in the Floridsdorf project emphasise the importance and exceptional quality of public transit in Vienna. Every resident uses this mode, on average, no less than 490 times a year, about three times the rate of the Hamburg, Amsterdam or Freiburg case studies, and 77% of residents hold periodical public transit passes. This brings the total modal share by trips to 58% (70% of journeys to work and school), though it must be maintained that many residents do bike and ride at the metro stations of Floridsdorf or Kagran, which is obscured by these figures but underlines the significance of the bicycle for local trips. An unusually large proportion of trips, though, is not quite as local: 41% of all trips and a substantial 52% of journeys to work and school exceed the 6 km limit, which may be regarded as the furthest trip length an average cyclist would be ready to cover on a regular basis. The average length of the journey to work and school is 7.6 km, not far off from the distance to the city centre. Longer trips - above 25 km - account for merely 2% of all trips, raising the insight that metropolitan Vienna's relative functional self-containment certainly works for inhabitants of Autofreie Mustersiedlung Floridsdorf (the nearest larger urban centre to Vienna is the Sloviakian capital Bratislava, but the functional linkages between the two still bear a rather uneven and unique character).

View AM Floridsdorf mobility data

There have been arguments within the community how to deal with the phenomenon of marginal car ownership in a neighbourhood where this is formally prohibited. We encountered both households who displayed understanding for the special circumstances of a small minority, not willing to let this have adverse impacts on the quality of the environment and the generally good spirits, and those who felt that some kind of action should be taken, since car owners were seen to take advantage of the sometimes difficult adjustments other residents had made towards a carfree lifestyle. We also talked to a few car owners themselves, whose reasons for clinging to vehicle ownership were quite varied, ranging from a car kept for the purpose of finalising the internal fit-out of the apartment (which the residents had a choice to do on their own) to a vehicle parked at its owner's nearby workplace and exclusively operated from there. It is to be hoped that these disagreements will find a forum for peaceful mediation and resolution among all parties involved, rather than be sorted out along the lines of a rumoured attempted assault on a car owner just before the time of the survey.

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Freiburg, Vauban: A sustainable urban district

In the fast-growing university city of Freiburg in the German southwest the land of a former French military base (Vauban) was made available for redevelopment as a model sustainable urban district in the early 1990s. Until 2006, it is anticipated to create housing for 5,000 inhabitants and 600 permanent jobs. A community association (Forum Vauban) was contracted by the city to do residents' participation, the elaboration of sustainability goals and PR work. A similar model had already been tested successfully in an earlier city extension area at Rieselfeld (though many grassroots activists lamented the lukewarm commitment to environmental and community innovations there). Several funds could be mobilised for the community planning and urban ecology innovations in Vauban, such as from the German Environment Foundation and the EU programme LIFE; furthermore Vauban was presented as German Best Practice at the 1996 UN Habitat II conference in Istanbul and played a role as an external site at the 2000 World Expo.

Vauban's implementation can be divided into five stages: The first stage includes a student village and the alternative cohousing group SUSI, both largely in converted barracks buildings. The second stage, officially known as 'erster Vermarktungsabschnitt' consists of new buildings in the eastern half of the site, either side of the central avenue (Vaubanallee). This section is now about 90% inhabited and this is the part - or more precisely, approximately two thirds of it that are free of front-door parking, some 240 units at present - that the data presented here refers to. The second stage will be duplicated with similar urban typology and traffic management in the western half of the site, towards the end of which there will be a regional rail stop and tram terminus in a few years' time, as a third stage which is now under construction ('zweiter Vermarktungsabschnitt'). The remaining two stages are the solar district Schlierberg, east of the present sections - a neighbourhood of 210 plus-energy-houses, meaning they will produce excess electricity from photovoltaic systems feeding into the grid - and a final stage at the north of the site designed to integrate residential and commercial/light industrial uses to an even higher extent than what is happening in the first four stages already.

Most individual blocks within the surveyed section, which was largely completed during 1999, were sold to small cooperatives of owner-occupiers, each comprising between 3 and 21 households (Baugruppen), which were responsible for the detailed building design of their shared property, accommodating their specific individual and collective needs and aspirations in a common plan, and frequently pursuing additional environmental and social objectives. This not only generates remarkable diversity of architectural and open space solutions in a fine-grained mix of lot sizes suitable for varying building types from single-family terrace houses to 20-unit apartment buildings. It furthermore fosters fruitful cooperation and common activites between future neighbours at an early stage, providing ample opportunity to build a robust and conflict-tested community along with the buildings. Besides the owner cooperatives, there is a number of rental units, both with and without public subsidies (an earlier plan to incorporate some 25% of social housing into Vauban had to be reduced considerably due to cutbacks in the state of Baden-Württemberg's housing programme). Most remarkably, a share-owned association formed by households short of the means for outright home ownership for the purpose of creating self-administered rental housing on Vauban (GENOVA) has built a community-oriented project of 36 units in the second stage and will realise some 50 further units in the thrid stage.

The new district will largely consist of two to four storey row houses and walk-up apartments, at a net density of 90 to 100 units per hectare. All buildings meet (and in some cases substantially undercut) the 'Freiburg Low-Energy Standard' as pioneered in Rieselfeld and later made into municipal law (from 2001 these standards will apply throughout Germany), which caps the permissible heating energy need of new housing construction at 65 kW (234 MJ) per sqm and year. There is a lot of new-generation timber-frame construction of up to four storeys and some buildings are designed as 'passive houses', ie. they need no external energy input other than from the sun except in extreme winter conditions. Most buildings feature photovoltaics and solar-supported heating systems as well as intelligent ventilation with heat-recapture devices. District heating and sewage treatment is currently done through city-wide systems (since most infrastructure was already in place due to the former military use of the site) though most buildings have rainwater collection facilities and run some applications like toilets and garden watering from them. A small number of projects have incorporated innovations such as a vacuum converter for sewage and organic waste. There have repeatedly been calls for a combined heat and power plant specific to Vauban, which would allow a much higher scope of self-determination about the district's energy supply, but its implementation is still far from certain.

Vauban's transport concept is quite exceptional: within the surveyed section, zoning prohibits the construction of parking space on the site of the house. Vehicle owners are, instead, made to purchase a parking space in a four-story structure at the perimeter (with ample photovoltaics on the roof and hence known as Solargarage Vauban) which is up to a five-minute walk from some dwellings. Cars may enter the residential streets but only for loading and unloading purposes, and visitors, too, are expected to park their car in the perimeter garage and pay for the privilege like they would in a downtown car park. Housing units and parking spaces are sold separately, which results in extra costs for vehicle owners of approx. DM 27,000 (A$ 22,000). For this purpose, future residents are made to declare their status of vehicle ownership on a yearly basis, and there is scope to allow for households to buy or sell vehicles as long as they acquire or return a parking space with it. Carfree households are organised in a special association and are granted exemption from the legal requirement to provide a parking space for each residential unit; however, the carfree association was required to buy a site that could be used for the construction of a car park should the number of car-owning households increase beyond the capacity of the existing garages. Until then (which may well be never), the reserve will be used as public open space. Within the second stage (erster Vermarktungsabschnitt) some 55% of households declared car ownership and 45% did not. These figures appear to be quite close to those one would find across all households in Freiburg. Other than in Vienna or Hamburg (Saarlandstraße), carfree and car-owning households will be mixed throughout the settlement, but the exclusion of vehicle traffic from the residential areas will encourage that a carfree character is maintained regardless. Since its gradual completion during 1999, Vauban's second stage has advanced to the largest carfree housing project in Germany to date.

At 3 km from the city centre in a rather small and compact city of 200,000, Vauban is not in the middle of the action when it comes to its location in the urban context. There are existing shopping facilities within walking distance, particularly in the neighbouring municipality of Merzhausen. Vauban's anticipated 600 jobs at 5,000 population constitute a well-meaning start at establishing a mixed-use district, but are still a far cry off from employment self-sufficiency (which would suggest a need of some 2,000 jobs). The provision of non-residential uses within small owner co-operatives has shown a mixed picture: While some successful examples exist - particularly where members of the co-operative were ready to set up shop from the beginning - interest for the sites lining the central avenue where ground floor non-residential uses are mandatory was initially slow among the co-operatives and is now mostly in the hands of commercial developers who will provide rental housing above the shops. A supermarket is located in one of the district garages near the eastern edge of the district, it uses a share of that parking space for visitors from elsewhere but has its most important market in Vauban pedestrians.

Vauban's tram link to Freiburg is unlikely to materialise before 2006; on the other hand, this is the year until when under state law, revenue from the sale of land in Vauban can be used to fund it (amounting to some 30% of total costs). After that, a different funding formula would have to be found and that would make the project more unlikely. The delaying factor at this time is not so much Vauban where a tram reserve exists, but the line's connection to the existing network and a conflict over whether it should use a new alignment in the city centre rather than the existing ones.

To make carfree living more attractive under these conditions, the car sharing association has negotiated a package deal with the regional transit operators and German Rail. Members signing up for car sharing will, upon payment of a DM 700 deposit (half of which is refundable upon cancellation) qualify for a free annual public transit pass covering the entire Southern Black Forest region and a free BahnCard, which is a subscription pass of German Rail entitling its holder for nation-wide half-price train travel for a year. A range of different sized cars, located in the solar garage, as well as bikes and trailers have been available for hire in Vauban since the second stage has been substantially inhabited.

* To open by 2006
** Demand-responsive parking provision

View Vauban photo page

Notably, Vauban seems to exert considerable attraction to groups known regionally as 'Häuslebauer': families and individuals whose primary interest is acquiring residential property (including many first-home owners) with urban ecology merely being an added bonus. The desire to live in a home in outright ownership was given by more than half of all respondents as a determining reason to move into Vauban. These people apparently jump at the opportunity to have influence both on the design of their unit and residential environment, and the evolution of the social community long before moving in. Such options rarely exist in traditional suburban development.

It is hardly surprising that the first thing to notice upon entering Vauban is the sheer number of young children roaming around and making the place their home. Every carfree housing development introduced in this chapter is a haven for kids and attracts households with kids, but in Vauban there is an additional dimension to it, a kind of 'children public' that inescapably penetrates the entire community. Almost half of the residents in the survey section are under the age of 18, and less than one quarter of all households are adult-only. The average household size is a staggering 3.34 persons (the regional average can't be a lot higher than 2.0), and the average size of the housing units, much larger than in any other case study at 115 sq m, reflects this. But while the small children are the most visible factor of a family-friendly district, we also encountered - to the amazement of several residents and even Forum Vauban activists - a considerable number of households with teenagers. There are a number of facilities for small children - childcare facilities both public and private, playgrounds, activity groups and a primary school - while the question of youth facilities is often regarded as an issue to be dealt with in five or ten years' time. Wrongly so - facilities for teenagers are needed now, and there was a heavy dispute between the city and Forum Vauban in October 2000 about the future of the community house, which is in a reused barracks building. The city mounted plans to demolish it and replace it with a purpose-built structure which the Forum felt was designed to put community initiatives in their place to some extent, spatially as well as organisationally, since the official plans call for much of the social work to be done by traditional organisations which currently have little foothold in Vauban.

Like in the Vienna, Amsterdam and Hamburg case studies, Vauban's adult population has a strong middle-age focus with those under 30 or over 60 clearly under-represented. 90% of households have an independent income, with 50% doing some or all of their gainful work at home (there are, however, more traditional professionals in this group, particularly teachers, than representatives of the 'New Economy'). Between 75-80% are homeowners, a higher share than in any other case study. Over two thirds of households fit the definition of a nuclear family (two or more adults and one or more children under 18), again significantly more that in any other case study (Vienna's Autofreie Mustersiedlung Floridsdorf, at 41%, is a distant second). However, before Vauban gets romanticised as the last stronghold of a bygone social order, be advised that not few of these households are second- or third-round families where relations between adults and children are not necessarily biological or matrimonial.

View Vauban demographic data

There are 46% of households who do not own a car (meaning they save on the cost of the parking facility). In fact, the number of cars in Vauban has declined solidly since people moved in, from 1 per 4.0 to 1 per 5.4 (and even more if not counting the motorcycles a small number of residents has obtained to compensate for the difficulties in car ownership under Vauban conditions). Freiburg's bicycle facilities and use are unusually good for the region, and public transit - notwithstanding the fact that access to Vauban remains bus-based and peripheral for the time being - has a very strong position for a city of that size. We counted an average of 166 trips on public transit per resident and year, amounting to 19% of all trips, with 32% of residents hold a periodical public transit pass. The strength of non-motorised transport, accounting for 64% of all trips (the second highest figure in this survey after Amsterdam's GWL-terrein, and the highest - also 64% - for journeys to work and school), makes sense when considering that 84% of all trips are no further than 6 km. There is, however, a small but significant share of long-distance commuting, particularly up and down the Rhine corridor, in some cases as far as Switzerland (8% of journeys to work or school are over 25 km). The significance of the planned regional rail stop at Vauban becomes obvious here. The average distance to work or school is 6.8 km, within which radius most relevant destinations within Freiburg are easily included (the city centre itself is located 3.5 km north of Vauban).

Car sharing counts on 46% of Vauban households as members - as elaborated above, this is being offered as a package with annual public transit travelcards and rail discount passes and thus becomes extra attractive. Some 6% of all automobile mileage is done in car sharing vehicles. The remainder - 16% of all trips, almost half of which are for leisure purposes - adds up to an average of 16 weekly passenger trips per private vehicle. In terms of mobility and lifestyles, there is a group with car-dominated activity patterns (more than 50% of all trips by car) but it is marginal (4%). 36% of households, in contrast, live largely carfree (less than 10% of all trips by car).

View Vauban mobility data

We asked respondents in every case study area to assess the particular concepts of their neighbourhood, and were quite surprised to find that in Vauban, a substantial 39% of households expressed disapproval about the mobility management concept as it is currently run. This takes divided opinions into account (counted as a half-vote), and there were a lot of divided opinions indeed. All but a very marginal group support the idea of a traffic-free neighbourhood in principle, and 87% contended that they were particularly attracted to Vauban because of it. But simultaneously, many residents feel that the concept does not operate very well on the ground, for a variety of reasons.

• On one hand, the rule allowing cars into the residential streets to load and unload, but not to park, raises a regulatory problem lacking an institution with the powers to resolve or even mediate it. In practice, a substantial number of residents do leave their car in the streets for more than loading and unloading purposes, sometimes even overnight, causing disgust with neighbours who call for tighter enforcement of parking regulations. The city has announced it will soon start to issue parking fines in Vauban, but it becomes clear that both users and authorities are walking a tight rope here, since even in transport-innovative Freiburg there is no precedent for this type of parking management, let alone in a brand-new district.
• Of course, those who do take their cars into residential streets do not necessarily do so to annoy everyone else - they may have good enough reasons for it. People on tight daily schedules maintain that it is simply too inconvenient to take the car to or from the garage each time, particularly when the next trip looms closely ahead or when it means leaving a bunch of small children to their own devices. Problems of sickness and disabilities were mentioned and safety issues - even in Vauban, a parking garage may not be the most comfortable of places at night - and one respondent suggested that the concept was downright socially regressive, ie. discriminating against lower-income households, single parents and women who are more likely to encounter situations where front-door parking appears inevitable.
• This is, of course, connected to the rather high explicit cost of parking in Vauban, which is usually hidden in the total housing cost in conventional development. There have been some press reports about parking bludgers who try to avoid the cost of parking by applying the tricks of the trade described in the Amsterdam section (and more). The real number of such people is very marginal - we interviewed only one household who admitted to such practice, and even they maintained it was only temporary - but the fact they exist is a source of disdain particularly to those who paid DM 27,000 (A$ 22,000) for the privilege of keeping a car while living in Vauban. It is ultimately the task of Forum Vauban to put pressure onto these people, which is hardly an enviable position.
• Last but not least, there is the problem of visitor parking. Many respondents report that their visitors are irritated by the concept of having to pay for parking in an edge-of-town residential area, and more so in a peripheral garage some distance away from their final destination. Compliance, thus, is not excessive. But I have also found out that 55% of personal visitors in Vauban arrive by car, which is a rather high share compared to other case study areas and can probably be related to the mediocre standard of public transit. The planned tram line will eventually run along the middle of Vaubanallee and provide much closer access to the residential streets than the parking garages, but until it is built the buses on Merzhauser Straße, adjacent to the parking garage, will have to do.

So there are some obvious conflicts to deal with, but then it must be maintained that Vauban, with its rich community life and institutionalised participation mechanisms, is well-equipped for a process of resolution. While some residents seem to resort to wilfully anarchic traffic behaviour, vigilance or dobbing, there remains a perfectly civilised majority who should not wait to take over the debate and initiate a roundtable discussion process with users, operators and experts on how to improve the traffic and parking concept in Vauban. After all, these schemes have always been experimental, and it is completely acceptable to renegotiate experiments along the track and allow for their further evolution, even if it ultimately means diverging from the original ideas.

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Useful Links

The Carfree Cities Network provides information on the function of car sharing, as well as a host of related initiatives.

Carfree.com offers information on carfree cities past, present and future. The site proposes solutions to the problem of the urban automobile.

There are several online forums related to the topic on The Commons website at ecoplan.org:
The International CarShare Consortium as a network facility for car sharing initiatives;
the World Car Free Day Consortium on the movement to celebrate regular carfree days in a growing number of cities around the world;
and the online journal World Transport Policy and Practice, where an earlier version of this website was published in 1998 (Vol 4, No 3).

Further information on the evolution of the sustainable urban district in Freiburg-Vauban can be found on the website of Forum Vauban eV. 

A German version of this website will shortly be available at Vienna Council's Green Club, whose own website also features additional details and links on the Floridsdorf project.

The Research Institute for Urban and Regional Development in North Rhine Westphalia (ILS) acts as coordinator of various carfree housing initiatives within that state, throughout Germany and abroad.

Selected Bibliography

Bellaire N (2000) Wohnen ohne Auto. Planung und Realisierung autofreier und autoreduzierter Quartiere in NRW. RaumPlanung 90, Juni 2000

Berents R (1998) Duurzaam bouwen in Amsterdam. PlanAmsterdam, No 4/1998

Chorherr C (1996) Die 'autofreie' Siedlung in Wien 21. Source unknown

Dittrich A, Klewe H (1997) Autofreie Stadtquartiere - Anforderungen, Projekte, Erfahrungen. in Institut für Landes- und Stadtentwicklungsforschung NRW (ILS) (1997) Planung und Realisierung autoarmer Stadtquartiere. Anforderungen - Konzepte - Chancen der Umsetzung, Dortmund, Germany

Domizil/GEWOG (2000) Modellprojekt Autofreie Mustersiedlung. Projektinformation. Wien, Austria

Epp C (1997) Grundlagen der rechtlichen Gestaltung autofreier Projekte. In Münchener Forum (1997, Ed) Wohnen ohne Auto. Bauen für die Zukunft - mobil, flexibel, autofrei. München, Germany

Forum Vauban (1998) Wohnen ohne eigenes Auto. Vauban spezial, Februar 1998, Freiburg, Germany

Forum Vauban (1999) A Journey Through the Model District Vauban. A Vision Taking Shape. Freiburg, Germany

Hazel G (1998) Sustainable Transport: Edinburgh's Approach. World Transport Policy and Practice, Vol 4, No 4

Hoopmann R, Volpert M (1996) Die neue Kasseler Stellplatzsatzung. Hintergründe und Auswirkungen. Verkehrszeichen 4/1996

Johnsen D (1998) Das Hamburger Projekt WohnMobil. Die Verbindung von Wohn- und Mobilitätsangebot als ein Beitrag für eine umweltverträgliche Stadtentwicklung? Diplomarbeit, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

Keipinger R (1996) Stellplatzverpflichtung: eine Bastion wackelt. Verkehrszeichen 4/1996

Reutter U, Reutter O (1996a) Autofreies Leben in der Stadt - Autofreie Stadtquartiere im Bestand. Dortmund, Germany

Reutter U, Reutter O (1996b) Car-Free Households: Who Lives Without an Automobile Today? World Transport Policy and Practice, Vol 2, No 4

Rottenberg (1998) Dachgarten statt Auto. Falter 45/1998

Scheurer J (1998) Evaluation of Danish Ecological Housing and Planning. ISTP/FSL, Perth, Australia and Hørsholm, Denmark

Sperling C (1999, Ed) Nachhaltige Stadtentwicklung beginnt im Quartier. Ein Praxis- und Ideenhandbuch für Stadtplaner, Baugemeinschaften, Bürgerinitiativen am Beispiel des sozial-ökologischen Modellstadtteils Freiburg-Vauban. Öko-Institut/Forum Vauban, Freiburg, Germany

Stadt Köln, Stadtplanungsamt (1998) Modellprojekt Autofreies Wohnen in Köln. Dokumentation Marktuntersuchung, Cologne, Germany

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