Former military barracks transformed into one of the city’s most thriving neighbourhoods through a regeneration process spanning more than 30 years, a regional cooperation network built on research and innovation rather than mass production, and two neighbouring cities that decided to join forces to attract investment. These are just a few of the things we saw during the study visit of 23–24 June to Ulm, Neu-Ulm and Augsburg, organised together with the Romanian-German Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Bačka Regional Development Agency from Novi Sad.
The purpose of the visit was to give the partners the opportunity to see how Western Europe approaches issues such as brownfield regeneration, investor attraction, and the development of support infrastructure for innovation and business. On the first day, we had meetings with the Ulm Economic Development Department, the Ulm Chamber of Industry and Commerce (left), and the Neu-Ulm Department of Urban Planning (middle), and on the second day we met with representatives of the Augsburg Regional Development Agency (Regio Augsburg Wirtschaft GmbH – right).
Although the two cities are neighbours, Ulm lies in the state of Baden-Württemberg while Neu-Ulm lies in Bavaria, which in practice creates numerous legal and administrative differences. In spite of this, in 2000 the two local administrations decided to set up the Stadtentwicklungsverband Ulm/Neu-Ulm, an association dedicated to cross-border urban development between the two cities. Its purpose is to jointly capitalise on the area’s development potential in order to increase the competitiveness of the two cities compared with other urban centres in the region, making a substantial contribution to securing and creating jobs. In practice, the association handles the brokering and allocation of land available for investment in Ulm and Neu-Ulm, supports companies relocating from one city to the other, and promotes the two as twin cities.
This close administrative collaboration between the two cities facilitates the area’s harmonious development, so that together they become a more viable region for investors than if each pursued the same efforts on its own. At the same time, the two cities also benefit from a favourable geographic position, lying between two of Germany’s largest economic and cultural centres: Stuttgart and Munich.
Also in the first day, in Neu-Ulm, we visited the Wiley district, one of the largest urban regeneration projects in the region. It is a former American military quarter of nearly 80 hectares, vacated in 1991 when American troops withdrew from the area. Rather than letting it fall into disuse, the city of Neu-Ulm decided to buy the entire site between 1993 and 1994 and gradually transform it, over more than three decades, into a functional neighbourhood.
What we found relevant was how the process was managed: the city retained control over the land and public infrastructure (streets, green spaces), but gradually sold, starting in 1998, individual plots to developers or to private individuals interested in building a home in the area, as each zone became ready for construction. To decide what the new district should look like, the local administration organised a national urban planning competition in 1994.
What’s more, during the transition period the land did not sit empty: in 2008, a large part of the site was turned into a public garden for a regional horticultural exhibition (known in German as the Landesgartenschau), which kept public interest alive and brought visibility to the area even before it was fully built up. The key decisions remained with the local administration, which coordinated the process, and residents were able to take part directly, including through a public consultation dedicated to people living in the area.
Walking through the district’s three zones confirms what the city hall representatives who presented this transformation process told us: the interventions in the neighbourhood don’t feel like a single large intervention, but rather like a series of small decisions, taken one at a time, over three decades. For instance, the northern zone, home to a modern cinema, a business incubator and student dormitories, coexists with the central zone, where the sports and cultural infrastructure left over from the 2008 horticultural exhibition was preserved and became part of the neighbourhood’s everyday life, not just a temporary backdrop.
In addition, the southern zone, the largest of the three, shows that a residential neighbourhood of nearly 3,500 residents can be designed from the outset with a green corridor connecting it to the rest of the city, rather than adding one later as a correction. This is the kind of coherence that isn’t achieved through a single ambitious urban plan, but through the patience to let each stage settle before moving on to the next. This lesson may in fact be even more important than the project’s technical details.
On the second day, in Augsburg, we learned about a different direction for economic development: the AI Production Network Augsburg, a partnership between the regional economic development agency A³ Regio Augsburg Wirtschaft and the University of Augsburg, together with cooperation networks among industrial players in the region. What we found interesting here was the development direction chosen: the region is not betting on mass production or low costs, but on research and innovation. These fields require large investments in knowledge and highly specialised skills, which, once developed, are hard for other regions to replicate. The network simultaneously supports applied research projects in artificial intelligence for manufacturing, vocational training programmes to update employees’ skills, and seed funding for teams looking to develop their own technological solutions as independent businesses. It is, in essence, a strategy for staying competitive not through volume, but through the level of expertise.
Although the examples from Ulm, Neu-Ulm and Augsburg may be considered too far removed from the reality of a small Romanian city, and the differences are indeed real: these German cities have access to a much larger public budget, to high-performing research institutions well embedded in national and international cooperation networks, and they also benefit from private capital available for long-term investment.
Many cities do not have a technical university on the scale of the one in Augsburg, nor the resources of an administration able to buy an entire 80-hectare plot of land outright, as Neu-Ulm did. Yet perhaps the scale of the sums involved and the size of the investments matter less than the principles and the working process behind these projects. The Wiley district was not transformed overnight, but through sustained institutional commitment over three decades, with small but steady steps, and the example set by Augsburg shows that a city doesn’t have to compete on cost or production volume — it can instead choose to invest, at its own scale, in what it already knows how to do well, whether that means a local industrial tradition, a research institute, a business incubator, or another field where demand is still unmet.
So for many cities undergoing development processes, the goal should not be to copy a growth model exactly as it was applied elsewhere, but to draw inspiration from these models and adopt the principles behind them, adapting them to local needs and specificities.
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This visit is part of the “ReInd-BBG: Reindustrialisation following the Brownfield better than Greenfield Principle” project, funded through the Interreg Danube Region Programme, and for more details about this project you can see our post here.
