ABSTRACT

Germany sits in this panorama of approaches to guiding major infrastructure in a rather paradoxical way. An outsider would see Germany as a highly planned and regulated country. This could be expected to include the approach to the arrangement of infrastructure systems at all levels. And this might be expected to be particularly the case given Germany’s fame in engineering and high technology fields, able to stand alongside countries like Japan, the US and France. In some respects this expectation is fulfilled. Germany is a country equipped with high-quality infrastructure systems in most fields, whether for transport, energy, water or waste. At least to the view of the outsider, it is not a country which needs to agonise too much about critical infrastructure gaps. In recent decades much has been built to deal with any incipient gaps. But, it is not a country which finds these decisions especially smooth or easy to take, certainly in some fields. In some ways, infrastructure plays to German worries about its governance systems. It is interesting to look at this concern, in the midst of relative success, as well as what this stems from and how the country responds. This then provides the context for the relationship to spatial planning. As we will see, that relationship is also not easy in some dimensions.