Loc­a­tion Search for Edu­ca­tional Build­ings

Many upcom­ing day­care and school build­ing pro­jects in Frank­furt am Main are faced with a very lim­ited supply of sites. The high require­ments for school loc­a­tions in terms of sur­round­ing, access­ib­il­ity and size are hardly met by the few exist­ing prop­er­ties. Against this back­ground, a struc­tured pro­cess for the search of suit­able land was developed.

As a first step, the devel­op­ment of a land cadaster cre­ated a tool for col­lect­ing, cat­egor­iz­ing and assess­ing poten­tial areas. Sub­sequently, a pro­ject organ­iz­a­tion as well as pro­cesses for the hand­ling of site issues were defined in col­lab­or­a­tion with the involved city depart­ments and spe­cial­ized units. In addi­tion to provid­ing an over­view of land poten­tials related to edu­ca­tional build­ings, the goal was to identify bot­tle­necks and to develop pro­ced­ures for a struc­tured decision-making pro­cess when reserving suit­able plots. The col­lec­ted inform­a­tion regard­ing usab­il­ity or restric­tions of plan­ning reg­u­la­tions, ease­ments, flight noise zones, SEVESO guidelines, con­struc­tion law, access­ib­il­ity and con­tam­in­a­tions was integ­rated dir­ectly into the internal geo-inform­a­tion system of the City of Frank­furt. This enables an urban-spa­tial ori­ent­a­tion for each eval­u­ated loc­a­tion and ensures a long-term usab­il­ity of the tools developed. At the same time, spe­cific­a­tions for tech­nical and edu­ca­tional require­ments were defined, which led to a defin­i­tion of space and time demands for new schools accord­ing to the Integ­rated Edu­ca­tion Devel­op­ment Plan. By super­im­pos­ing the require­ments with the ascer­tained loc­a­tion inform­a­tion, school-spe­cific ‘search areas’ were defined and visu­al­ized using over­view maps.

The devel­op­ment of the data­base, the pro­cess sup­port and the eval­u­ation of the res­ults were car­ried out by PRO­PRO­JEKT in close cooper­a­tion with the city depart­ment for edu­ca­tion.