Ein gutes Stück Stuttgart. Der neue Stöckach. // A good part of Stuttgart. The new Stöckach.

In this way, the city and the company can open a new chapter in their collaboration together, while growing together and learning from each other: The city’s development, and the people living there, are bound to benefit from the up to 800 apartments being built. This accommodation is urgently needed and will be in a very central location with excellent transport links. This project will also allow EnBW to boost its profile for the development of complex urban infrastructure and continue its transition from an energy company into an infrastructural partner. However, the site will not only be used for residential accommodation. It is set to change from being a place of work for 1,000 people to become an integrated quarter where people can live together, make their home, work together in businesses large and small, share a common space, laugh and have fun: a positive urban development in Stöckach, with a neighbourhood feel!

• The expectations of the awarding authority are high, with a vision to match:
• The goal is to achieve an ideal, forward-looking, truly people-oriented district with strong human, energy, architectural and forward-thinking qualities.
• The new Stöckach will set international standards while also allowing its residents to experience life in a fully-functioning city district in the shorter-term.
• From an urban planning perspective, the new Stöckach will make its mark not only in Germany, but around the world. From an architectural point of view, it will be not unlike the way in which Fritz Leonhardt’s television tower, or Frei Otto’s Munich Olympic stadium roof (which was developed in Stuttgart), or the Weissenhof housing estate, each proved to be stand-out examples in their own respective disciplines.
• The key question here is how we want to live in the future. The new Stöckach will be built in the 2020s and will be expected to continue to inspire visitors beyond 2100 and provide an international exemplar. In the same way, some housing estates from early, and more recent, architectural modernity continue to be held up as examples to this day.
• Worldwide climate change requires responsible cities, companies and the population as a whole to make radical, consistent, immediate changes to how they use resources on a day-to-day basis in order to reduce their daily emissions. How can urban planning and technology respond to this challenge so that people experience new environmentally-sound styles of day-to-day living as an improvement in their quality of life, rather than as a sacrifice?
• More than ever, it is about the urgent need for social cohesion: How can the urban planning of the future help new urban districts to become home again, and to become several, diverse homes?
• How do we respond to these quickly-changing living requirements?
• Given Stuttgart’s particular topographical situation positioned in a basin, planners face particular challenges in terms of climate, transport and the expansion that is required within the urban space. How we will we cope with warming and ‘heat islands’ in the city, and how will we provide for our mobility in the near, and more distant, future?

We should step up to this challenge. Given the rapid pace of technological, social and ecological change, how can we know what will be relevant in 2100? We cannot know this, nor will we be able to find out with absolute certainty. However, we can invite the best architects to help us to lay the foundations and to create a piece of the city that is resilient, that can meet all challenges and that is conceived, built, and inhabited in an integrated way.

We should step up to this challenge. Given the rapid pace of technological, social and ecological change, how can we know what will be relevant in 2100? We cannot know this, nor will we be able to find out with absolute certainty. However, we can invite the best architects to help us to lay the foundations and to create a piece of the city that is resilient, that can meet all challenges and that is conceived, built, and inhabited in an integrated way.

However, in addition to the major questions for the future there are certainly parameters that we can already set for the quarter today, based on our current understanding. It needs to be socially, economically and ecologically sustainable, and as climate-neutral and climate-resilient as possible. This also includes a mixed usage structure such as that envisaged by the “urban district” (approx. 80% residential, 20% office space, commerce, retail, and social infrastructure), providing for easy access and a lively way of co-existing. Accordingly, residential use should more than meet the applicable requirements of the Inner City Development Model of Stuttgart (SIM) with up to 40% supported residential construction incl. a number of company apartments. This also includes social responsibility and an openness to new ideas and concepts. These values find expression at the concept specification stage and by involving the general public early on and to a much greater extent than normal.

EnBW has already established an Ideas Space in the planning area and initiated a public consultation process. The development will be informed and supported by information and discussion events. This participatory process is also intended to set an example.

This design competition also reflects an openness to new ideas. It is arranged as a two-phase, open competition so that all interested experts from the fields of architecture, urban planning and landscape design are free to bring forward whatever proposals they want.

At the end, their input will provide the basis for a master plan that will shape the rearrangement of the quarter, provide the basis for a new local plan and define the appropriate density and elevations to fit in with the surrounding quarter.