There is hardly a politician’s speech about Bavaria in which the praise of the uniquely beautiful cultural landscapes of the Free State is not sung. The reality is of course different. If you want to visit them, you only have to drive once on the A 92 from Munich to Deggendorf. From Landshut at the latest, gray concrete halls are lined up in ever shorter succession to the left and right of the lanes, one larger than the other, most with huge maneuvering areas for trucks in front of them. New ones are added every year, they eat their way through the country, so to speak. Even the formerly compact villages along the A 92 have mostly degenerated into a mush of settlements, whose monotonous new quarters and uniform commercial areas are spreading ever further into the landscape. And the A 92 is almost everywhere in Bavaria.
That’s why one can only agree with the Greens politician Ludwig Hartmann when he castigates the state government’s land-saving policy as “a crashing failure”. The CSU and Free Voters have not only come no closer to their promise in their 2018 coalition agreement to halve land use in the Free State. Instead, they have moved further away from it with each passing year of their coalition. Hartmann is also right about the causes of the gigantic disfigurement. You won’t get rid of the widespread use of information, appeals and best-practice examples alone. It needs binding specifications, otherwise it just keeps going.
It’s been a good four years since Hartmann launched the referendum “curb the flood of concrete – so that Bavaria stays at home”. The goal was a binding upper limit for land use of five hectares per day. The initiative was hugely popular. Within a short time, almost 50,000 voters signed the support lists – twice as many as would have been necessary. But then the Constitutional Court stopped the initiative. It’s time to start a new referendum against land use.