State-horticultural-shows as a format of event-driven development of small and medium cities

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Christian Diller
• Subject Area: Urbanism, Spatial Planning, Transportation and Infrastructure Planning, Landscape Planning
• Term: from 2017 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 389503094

The typifying comparative research concerning the formats of event-driven city- and regional-development so far was focused primarily on the First Leage of the events (especially Olympic Games, Football World- and European Championships, EXPO) and therefore on large cities (mostly more than 500.000 citizens). The research on event-driven urban development has brought findings to aspects of the physical urban development, economic and social impacts, cost-benefit-relations and political implications. Significant for he formats of event-driven urban development seems to be the so called push-up and redistribute effect. The findings on other formats deliver the base for the examnation of state-horticultural-shows; a format with all in all a large number of cases, allowing generalizing statements at least for some questions. The impacts of a single state-horticultural-show may be small compared with the large formats of event-driven urban-development; as well in positive as in negative senses. Alltogether (up to now in Germany over 150 state-horticultural-shows have been performed, thus, almost 8 million city-inhabitants have been directly affected) for the type of small- and mediums-sized as for the small large-cities they are an interesting research-topic in a comparing and punctual quantifying approach. To a greater extent as cities of the second, third and fourth leage of the city-hierarchy increasingly detect event-driven development for themselves. In the chronological observation they as well represent a good indicator for the changes of planning cultures in small and medium-sized cities; especially concerning the significance of paticipative elements.Firstly in the research-project a nationwide analysis of all german state-horticultural-shows since 1992 will be carried out, which is focused on attributes easy to operationalize. This analysis stands in the perspective of seven hypothesis and six central questions. As its result types are built, which are the base for nine ex-post case-studies, in which ecological, social, economic and political are deeper examined in a qualitative way on interdependencies. Simultaneously accompanying case-studies in further six state-horticultural-shows in several points of time (apllication-phase, planning-phase, even-phase) will be executed.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants