Housing knows no administrative boundaries. People's living environments and areas of activity are becoming increasingly regionalized. The close regional and Euregional ties are reflected in increasing commuter numbers as well as leisure and migration movements beyond the city limits. Over 100,000 employees subject to social insurance contributions now commute to or from Aachen. The regional center of Aachen fulfills an important function for the region as an economic center and university location - but even a regional center cannot function without population, purchasing power, supplies and services from the surrounding area.
For the people in the region, municipal or even national borders play only a minor role and they expect cooperative regional solutions. From the perspective of the city of Aachen, housing development cannot therefore stop at the city boundary; rather, regional and cross-border cooperation is necessary and logical.
As part of a future housing strategy, the action plan for housing identified that housing development should be viewed from a Euregional perspective in the future and shaped together with Aachen's neighboring municipalities.
City of Aachen
As a prelude to this, the first symposium on regional and Euregional housing took place on 24.11.2022 with a keynote speech by Dr. Ralph Henger, Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft, on the "Importance of inter-municipal housing development". As part of the event, the associated challenges, but above all the opportunities for concrete joint action and project approaches in the key areas of housing projects, Euregional housing and settlement data, settlement development and mobility, were discussed in three interactive workshops together with experts from administration, science, politics and business.
What Aachen cannot achieve, the region can. Active management creates win-win situations for individual municipalities and the region as a whole. At the request of the symposium participants, the focus will be on two in-depth topics in 2023.
To this end, the experts met on 20.04.2023 for an expert forum to deepen the discussion on the topic of "Housing projects in the (eu)regional area". 50 people from the region and the euregional area took part in the first (eu)regional expert forum. These included representatives from the housing industry, regional companies and employees from the surrounding and cross-border municipalities.
The lively exchange at all levels was perceived as particularly positive by the participants and there was an increasing desire for continuation.
In addition to impulses from the housing action plan, the results of the last symposium were shared. In addition, the topic of housing was examined from various perspectives and input was provided on future visions of housing, housing projects and mobility.