This short paper explores good practice guidance on sustainable urban development . It will examine whether the Garden Town model could be reinvented with learnings from Tübingen to further its aims of creating socially, environmentally and economically sustainable communities. The German town of Tübingen seeks to restore the city’s social and economic function as an ‘integration machine’ through urban structures and municipality-led public participation. With this philosophy and method the local council has created 6 successful neighbourhoods since the 1990s (with the seventh being currently underway) and inspired planners in Europe and beyond. First, I will briefly review the literature on the transnational flow of planning (Healey, 2013; Huxley, 2013) and set out to probe how the Tübingen ‘good practice’ could be transferred to the masterplanning of Tewkesbury Garden Town (TGT) in England. Second, I will examine the two countries’ shared and diverging context of urban planning (Jacobs, 1961; Feldtkeller (ed), 2001; Hamiduddin and Gallent, 2017; Schaller, 2021) as well as the projects themselves. Third, I take a closer look at the details of the Tübingen good practice and draw out learnings for Tewkesbury in terms of planning tools, masterplan design and participation (Schaller, 2021). Fourth, I reflect on neoliberal urbanism and gentrification in Tübingen. Finally, I conclude that there is potential for the Garden Town to be reinvented but the space for experimentation is dependent on the political will created by the interplay of bottom-up citizen action and top-down planning.

The third century in the Eastern provinces of the Roman Empire saw the beginning of an astonishing development of settlements, which reached its peak in the Byzantine period in the V-VI century. This phenomenon involved not only the larger urban centres in the region – the former poleis organised according to more or less strict Hellenistic models, like the Decapoleis. It saw also, if not especially, a unseen development of the rural hinterland of these cities, more and more intensively settled by villages and other kind of settlements, which definition is nonetheless problematic and intriguing. This kind of settlements underwent a diversified process: on the one side, some former villages developed into cities, being also officially recognised as such but not changing considerably their spatial organisation – like in the case of Esbus/Tall Hisban near Madaba (Jordan); on the other side, there is also the formation of renewed large settlements – referred to as towns in many scientific publications, like Umm el-Jimal in northern Jordan – that if potentially showing urban features, doesn’t appear as official cities or poleis. The present paper aims to investigate this semi-urban or semi-rural dimension, focusing especially on the social triggers that might help explaining not only the phenomena mentioned above, but also some similarities in the spatial organisation visible also in the former poleis in the Late Antique periods.

Thinking has its strategies and tactics too, much as other forms of action have. Merely to think about cities and get somewhere, one of the main things to know is what kind of problem cities pose, for all problems cannot be thought about in the same way.

Following the concept “city as place”, urbanity and the reurbanisation discourse are critically reviewed. The concepts are redeveloped and operationalised as an analytical instrument which allows for a detailed description of urban qualities. The key issue in this analysis is the definition of fundamental value orientations which are assumed to have a strong impact on the choice of residence. With this new concept, intra-urban migration patterns in the city of Mannheim are studied quantitatively as well as the overall migration dynamics. Different population groups with their characteristic moving patterns are compared in the light of urban qualities. Implications for the reurbanisation discourse as well as for urban planning and development are discussed. Dem Konzept “city as place“ folgend werden Urbanität und Reurbanisierungsdiskurs kritisch geprüft. Die Konzepte werden als analytische Instrumente neu entwickelt und operationalisiert, um eine detailierte Beschreibung urbaner Qualiäten zu erlauben. Der zentrale Punkt in der Analyse ist die Definition grundlegender Wertorientierungen, für die angenommen wird, dass sie starken Einfluss auf die Wohnstandortwahl haben. Mit diesem neuen Konzept werden die innerstädtischen Wanderungsmuster in Mannheim sowie die allgemeine Wanderungsdynamik quantitativ untersucht. Unterschiedliche Bevölkerungsgruppen mit ihren charakteristischen Umzugsmustern werden vor dem Hintergrund urbaner Qualitäten verglichen. Die Implikationen für den Reurbanisierungsdiskurs sowie Stadtplanung und -entwicklung werden diskutiert.