Hessen

New Year's Reception of the Green Associations of Hesse on 19 January 2018 at the Wiesbaden Casino Society

On the evening of 19 January 2018, the Green Professional Associations of Hesse met at a new location in the Wiesbaden Casino Society in Wiesbaden for their joint, annual New Year's reception.

The Hessian state associations of the Federation of German Landscape Architects (bdla) and the German Society for Garden Art and Landscape Culture (DGGL), the Professional Association for Garden, Landscape and Sports Ground Construction Hesse-Thuringia (FGL), the Hessian Association for Nature Conservation and Landscape Management (HVNL) as well as the Hessian state group of the Garden Authority Managers Conference (GALK) had invited.

The chairman of the bdla Hessen e. V., landscape architect Victor Kamphausen, welcomed the 300 guests. In his welcoming speech, Kamphausen referred to the enormously increased importance of public green spaces, especially for expanding cities and metropolitan regions. With the advancing digitalisation of working, learning and living environments, the demand for recreation and meeting spaces will increase in the future, as will the longing for experiencing nature, rest and relaxation in open spaces. Experts believe that in smart cities, stationary traffic will gradually disappear from the cityscape and self-driving, readily available transfer and transport systems will make cars superfluous, while at the same time taking up much less space and creating open spaces. It will therefore be a major task and challenge for the sector to moderate and develop this process with new concepts of urban development and landscape architecture. The green professions in particular can participate in this process when it comes to shaping our cities into liveable and sustainably usable spaces.

Greetings from the Prime Minister of Hesse, Volker Bouffier, were delivered by State Secretary Thomas Metz, Hesse Ministry of Justice. "Creating more green and blue infrastructure in cities and towns is an important urban development policy goal of the Hessian state government. This includes green and water areas, square and street greening as well as roof, facade and courtyard greening. In Hesse, the creation of public kitchen gardens, the unsealing of surfaces, the maintenance of fresh air corridors and the renaturation of local waterways are now also eligible for funding as part of sustainable urban development," said State Secretary Thomas Metz.

He referred to the "Urban Redevelopment in Hesse" program, which focuses on climate adaptation and, with it, the promotion of green infrastructure. To date, 30 municipalities have participated in it. In addition, the federal-state programme "Zukunft Stadtgrün" (Future Urban Greenery), which was launched in 2017, promotes the high-quality expansion of urban greenery in Hessian cities and municipalities with around 7.5 million euros.

The keynote speech was given by Gerhard Matzig, architect and senior editor of the Süddeutsche Zeitung. In his lecture, he illuminated the question of how, in the fields of architecture and urban planning, a truly sustainable rethinking could grow out of a socially rather fashionable and superficially motivated understanding of green. Particularly against the background of increasing redensification as a consequence of the housing shortage, he calls for at least equal "post-greening" and thus a strengthening of the resource "public green". He calls on the profession of landscape architecture to have a self-confident understanding of its own relevance.

The official program in the Herzog-Friedrich-August-Saal was followed by the social part of the evening in the premises of the "Belle Etage" of the Wiesbaden Casino Society. Here, in the heart of the state capital, conviviality and culture are still regularly cultivated in a festive historical ambience in the house built from 1872 - 74 in the neo-Renaissance style. The members of the organizing associations and the guests from the economy, from municipalities as well as institutions of the green sector use the opportunity until late in the evening to get to know each other over food and drink, to have lively conversations, to exchange professional information and to make new contacts.

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