Background

Austria is among the countries with the highest levels of impervious surface coverage worldwide. Especially in rural areas, the large number of single-family homes consumes extensive land for infrastructure such as roads, supermarkets, shopping centers, and other services, each with generously sized parking areas. In urban areas as well, underused sites from deindustrialized areas and vacant commercial properties often remain unused because building on greenfield sites is still more affordable than systematically developing and repurposing already sealed land.

Project Objectives

To counteract the severe negative impacts on the microclimate in inner-city areas and the rapidly accelerating loss of our available green spaces, which are urgently needed to mitigate climate impacts, the project “ReSpace – Reclaiming Space” develops methods for identifying land potential, as well as catalogs of measures for removing impervious surfaces, repurposing sites, and circular-economy construction logistics.

ReSpace is developing a prototype for the semi-automated identification of urban land potential for the following use cases:

• Assessment of impervious-surface removal potential
• Use of sealed land for innovative logistics concepts (e.g. temporary storage areas and construction logistics centers in support of a circular economy)
• Repurposing sealed land

This is intended to enable, on the one hand, faster activation of unused, sealed land and, on the other hand, repurposing of these sites.