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Can Policies Learn? The Case of Urban Restructuring in Eastern Germany

Among the policies that were introduced with the specific purpose of dealing with the problems of east German cities one needs to mention especially the programme ‘Stadtumbau Ost’ (which can be translated into English as ‘Urban Restructuring East’). It was initiated in the year 2002 as a reaction to extraordinarily high vacancies that plagued east German cities as a result of a strong process of demographic shrinkage. This policy was intended to be based on the integrated approach to urban regeneration. Integrated approach is a concept that has been present in the planning discourse for a number of years, but it has become particularly popular due to the ‘Leipzig Charter on Sustainable European City’. It is generally agreed that the integrated approach, in contrast to a narrowly focused sectoral approach, should be based on strategic planning, include projects in different fields of intervention, and involve a number of different public and private actors. However, as it turned out, in the initial phase the implementation of Stadtumbau Ost tended to be narrowly focused on housing market issues, particularly on dealing with housing vacancies.Although it was generally agreed that Stadtumbau Ost significantly contributed to the stabilisation of housing markets in east German cities, with respect to other aspects (qualitative improvements in urban space) it turned out to be much less successful, at least in the first years of the implementation. As a consequence, the policy has undergone some changes in terms of legal regulations and financing in the next years. In this paper we would like present the gradual change that the policy has undergone in the course of the implementation. Using a range of sources including existing literature on the subject, policy reports, legal documents and financial data, as well as referring to information gathered during field research we look at the changes that the policy has undergone overtime, asking to what extent these changes resulted from the underlying dynamics of socio-economic processes, and to what extent can they be seen as a result of strategic decision making, resulting from a critical evaluation of the initial phase of policy implementation.