As important cultural assets, public spaces fulfil a wide range of functions for society: they serve transport, trade or consumption. They are places of communication, social understanding and political protest. And they offer space for sports and exercise, for cultural events, festivals and other forms of leisure and recreation. The (changing) social values and uses, lifestyles, forms of work and mobility and economies as well as current forms of local culture and communication are placing more and more different, sometimes contradictory demands on the use and design of public spaces. In addition, there is advancing climate change, which requires climate protection and climate adaptation measures. This creates a field of tension between diverse demands and real possibilities, which reflects the above-mentioned dynamics and leads to locally very different solutions.

In view of these new challenges and the diversity of the manifestations of public spaces, an overview is needed that sorts the different types and makes statements about which parts of public space are particularly relevant in relation to the above-mentioned functions and challenges. In the past, typifications of public spaces have already been worked out from a functional and formal-urban planning point of view, and their significance for democratic societies has been explained extensively. The Baukultur Report 2021 has also recently prepared the diverse requirements for public spaces. The results show that digitalisation, transport transition and adaptation to climate change, pandemics and the transformation of city centres, changing school systems and sports and leisure trends have or will have a strong impact on the use of public spaces and, in view of the lack of space, will lead to a superimposition of tasks. A further development and redesign of public spaces is therefore not a simple "beautification", but a complex transformation task in which far more than the previously relevant actors from architecture and urban planning have to participate across disciplines and institutions. Public spaces, their planning and design need to be rethought!

Within the framework of a study, a structured overview of the (current) importance of public spaces for urban development and their most pressing challenges today and in the future will therefore be created. With regard to the use and design of public spaces, the urban development situation, the usage structures, lines of conflict and approaches to solutions are to be determined for all relevant types of public spaces and evaluated with regard to the above-mentioned questions. With regard to possible solutions, suitable control options and the corresponding instruments at the different planning levels must be taken into account.

The aim is to provide an up-to-date overview that systematically and impartially prepares the increasing demands on public spaces, clarifies the legal framework and enables an assessment of the resulting challenges to planning practice and urban development policy. In the particular interest of the Federal Republic of Germany are statements on the two fields of action climate change/adaptability/resilience and sport/exercise, especially in public spaces, which are currently and will be subject to the strongest transformation.

See "Description of Services"