Citylabs for Germany

As part of the project “Citylabs for Germany – Managing inner city vacancies and attracting new tenants”, IFH COLOGNE worked with 15 model cities of various sizes from all over Germany – among them Mönchengladbach – to develop a digital tool for proactive settlement management in city centers and created the basis for dialog-oriented, standardized cooperation in the process of vitalizing city centers. The vacancy reporting tool was launched in February 2022 and can be found here.

By this means, vacancies were to be identified and brought back to the market more effectively by having them recorded. Other central goals were to make processes more flexible, to enable cities to take steering action and to jointly develop standards for dialog with the real estate industry.

The project of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, which was funded by the federal government (to implement the Online Access Act), had a total volume of around 11.9 million euros and ran until December 2022. In addition to Mönchengladbach, the participating municipalities included: Bremen, Erfurt, Hanau, Karlsruhe, Cologne, Langenfeld, Leipzig, Lübeck, Lüneburg, Nuremberg, Rostock, Saarbrücken, Trier and Würzburg. In Mönchengladbach, WFMG – Wirtschaftsförderung Mönchengladbach GmbH implemented the project, supported by the City of Mönchengladbach and the neighborhood management teams from Rheydt and Mönchengladbach.

Go to website: www.stadtlabore-deutschland.de
Vacancy reporting tool: www.wfmg.de/immobilien/ladenlokale/

The “Citylabs for Germany – Managing inner city vacancies and attracting new tenants” were funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (08/2021 to 12/2022).