Where should the state be heading?
Baden-Württemberg is rewriting its State Development Plan. But rather than leaving experts alone to deliberate over land use, transport and public services, hundreds of ordinary people were selected by lot. More than 200 initial demands eventually became 21 recommendations for the “Space for Tomorrow”. Now comes the hardest part of public participation: finding out whether those recommendations will actually become policy.
A State Development Plan is one of those documents whose importance seems to be inversely proportional to how well known it is. Hardly anyone reads it, hardly anyone talks about it – and yet it helps determine where homes may be built in the future, where commercial development can expand, which towns will remain service centres, where open spaces are protected and how transport, energy supply and climate adaptation are planned together.
Baden-Württemberg’s current State Development Plan dates back to 2002. Since then, there has been a financial crisis, a pandemic, an energy crisis, an accelerating climate crisis, new forms of work, a growing housing shortage and a digital transformation that has rendered some distances irrelevant while making others all the more apparent. The state government therefore decided to draw up an entirely new plan. Under the more congenial working title “Space for Tomorrow” (Raum für morgen), a process began that could shape the spatial development of the state for decades.
When Spatial Planning Becomes Everyday Life
And because terms such as land-use efficiency, spatial structure or the system of central places conceal some very tangible questions about everyday life, this time the usual circle of experts would not be the only people invited to have their say.
How far should people have to travel to see a doctor? Does every village need a supermarket? Where should wind turbines be built? How much land should be consumed by new housing and commercial developments? What should happen to land that has already been sealed over? And how can policymakers prevent the much-invoked promise of “equivalent living conditions” from becoming little more than a phrase in planning documents?
20,000 Letters
Baden-Württemberg’s Ministry of Regional Development and Housing opted for an unusually elaborate participation process. Using municipal population registers, 20,000 people from 122 municipalities of different sizes were randomly contacted. Around 1,200 expressed an interest in taking part. Participants were then selected according to age, gender, educational background and origin within their respective administrative regions in an attempt to create as diverse a group as possible. Across the two rounds, a total of 280 citizens participated.
Nicole Razavi, the state’s Minister for Regional Development, explained the effort involved: “This elaborate procedure was very important to us in order to represent as broad a spectrum of the population as possible and to include diverse perspectives.”
It is a striking statement for a discipline traditionally associated more with maps, spatial categories and administrative boundaries than with citizens selected by lot.
First of All: What Exactly Is Spatial Planning?
The process began with an online information session on 6 November 2023. Four full-day citizens’ dialogues followed in Karlsruhe, Donaueschingen, Sigmaringen and Heilbronn. Around 70 people at each event discussed in facilitated groups how people should live in urban and rural areas in the future, how economic prosperity could be safeguarded, and how open spaces could be protected and adapted to climate change.
The citizens’ dialogues were designed, organised and facilitated on behalf of the ministry by the agencies Die Regionauten and wer denkt was. Die Regionauten were responsible for areas including the overall concept, facilitation, documentation and visual presentation, while “wer denkt was” was involved, among other things, in the random-selection process.
Turning Everyday Experience into Demands
From the organisers’ perspective, the challenge was precisely to turn widely differing experiences of everyday life into something that could be used politically. “wer denkt was” described the aim as incorporating “diverse perspectives and ideas for the ‘space of tomorrow’”; Die Regionauten put their approach more succinctly: the views of citizens should be taken into account “as effectively as possible”.
By the end of the first round, participants had formulated more than 200 demands. They wanted, for example, sealed land to be restored to nature, vacant plots and empty buildings to be used more effectively, and new forms of housing to be made possible. Three quarters had said at the outset that they generally enjoyed living in their region. Their aim, then, was less to reinvent the state than to preserve its qualities under changing conditions.
Citizens Meet the Experts
The process could have ended there: citizens formulate their wishes, the ministry thanks them, and a glossy brochure appears.
But “Space for Tomorrow” was given a second loop.
Eighteen participants became citizen ambassadors. In April and May 2024, they attended thematic workshops with experts from ministries, regional government authorities, regional planning associations, municipal umbrella organisations, chambers and other bodies. They presented the citizens’ highest-priority demands and discussed what was feasible, sensible or problematic from a planning perspective.
Knowledge Flows Both Ways
This is more than a procedural detail. Public participation often suffers from a peculiar one-way flow of information: experts explain the world to citizens, who are then permitted to express their views about it. Here, knowledge was intended to travel in both directions. Experts heard the perspectives of randomly selected citizens; the citizen ambassadors then took the experts’ objections and observations back into the next round of deliberations.
In October 2024, 99 citizens therefore met again in Offenburg and Ulm; 83 of them had already participated in the first round. They were no longer confronted simply with a collection of 200 wishes. The most highly rated demands had been organised, subjected to expert scrutiny and tested against possible objections. The task now was to turn them into more precise recommendations.
Twenty-One Visions of a Good Place to Live
The final result was 21 recommendations.
They range from ensuring short distances to shops, healthcare and social services to affordable housing, transport and more efficient land use. The citizens want existing buildings and land to be used more effectively, multiple uses of sites to be encouraged and regional production to be strengthened. Their recommendations address renewable energy, electricity and water networks, digital infrastructure and the circular economy, but also flood protection, forest development, unsealing land, nature conservation and agriculture.
On transport, they call for long-term planning across different modes while remaining open to technological developments. Behind many of the recommendations lies the same principle: where someone lives should not determine whether they have access to essential services.
More Than Friendly Advice
Something else is striking. In their recommendations, the participants by no means see themselves merely as providers of suggestions for the administration. They write that random selection produces a “balanced civic opinion”. Participation, they argue, can contribute “to democratic legitimacy and greater acceptance” of the State Development Plan.
From this they derive a clear expectation. In return for their involvement, they state, they have “the clear expectation that our 21 recommendations” will be taken into account in drawing up the new plan. They also call for further public participation in the State Development Plan and, more generally, for greater citizen involvement in political decision-making.
This is the point at which participation becomes a political expectation.
Stuttgart’s Promise
On 6 November 2024, the recommendations were formally handed to Nicole Razavi in Stuttgart. State Secretary Andrea Lindlohr of the Greens and members of the state parliament’s Committee for Regional Development and Housing were also present.
Razavi gave a positive assessment: “It was worthwhile bringing very different positions together around one table.” The constructive exchange, she said, provided “a strong basis for the further process”.
Above all, however, she made a promise: “We will thoroughly incorporate both the content and the priorities expressed in the recommendation paper into the process of weighing up the different considerations.”
Taking Something into Account Is Not the Same as Adopting It
That sounds binding. But it is not the same as promising to adopt the recommendations.
And this is where the real problem of any such process begins.
It is still impossible to say how many of the 21 recommendations will actually be implemented.
The Long Journey from the Citizens’ Table to Planning Law
This is due less to a lack of political will than to the timing of the process. The citizens’ dialogues were deliberately held before the first draft of the new State Development Plan was prepared. The citizens’ recommendations, regional dialogues, expert workshops, academic studies and other submissions together form the material from which the ministry is developing the plan.
On the ministry’s current website, the 21 recommendations continue to be explicitly listed among the “inputs from early participation”. Yet as of August 2026, a completed first draft of the plan has still not been published there.
The recommendations have therefore entered the political planning process, but have not yet been translated into binding planning rules.
What Would Have Happened Anyway?
This makes assessing their impact difficult. Some of what the citizens are demanding – reducing land consumption, adapting to climate change, expanding renewable energy and improving essential public services – already features in the state’s key principles and strategic thinking. The question later on will therefore not simply be whether a particular demand appears in the State Development Plan. It will also be whether the citizens’ dialogues changed the way it was designed.
The success of “Space for Tomorrow” may ultimately be revealed by a rather unglamorous document: a comparative table.
The Crucial Table Is Still Missing
On the left: the 21 recommendations. On the right: the provisions of the new State Development Plan. In between: an explanation – adopted, partially adopted, implemented differently or rejected, and why.
No such public comparison exists yet.
Precisely because the participation process was so elaborate, it would matter. Twenty thousand people were contacted, hundreds gave up their time, 18 citizen ambassadors attended expert workshops, and 99 people returned for a second round. Anyone who invests this much in public participation does not merely generate ideas. They also generate expectations.
Participation Begins After the Participation Process
The participants themselves expressed those expectations with unusual clarity. Their recommendations were not supposed simply to disappear into a filing cabinet. They want to know what becomes of them.
Perhaps that is the real point of the experiment. Public participation does not prove its worth through how politely people debate with one another, how professionally the discussions are facilitated or how attractive the final report looks. It proves its worth afterwards.
When decisions are made.
A Space That Is Not Yet Finished
“Space for Tomorrow” is therefore, for now, neither a success nor a failure. The process has achieved something that spatial planning rarely manages: it persuaded people with no professional connection to the subject to grapple with the question of how an entire state should allocate its scarce land. More than 200 initial demands were refined, following exchanges with experts, into 21 comparatively focused recommendations. The citizens’ perspective was not appended retrospectively to a finished plan but introduced before the plan itself had been written.
That is the process’s strength.
Its weakness, so far, is the same as that of many participation exercises: between “We are listening to you” and “This is what we changed because of you” lies a considerable space.
For a project called “Space for Tomorrow”, the task now is to close it.
Note: This article was written with the help of AI.