Istanbul+5 Statement  05.06.2001 1. Introduction

1.Introduction

The results of the 1996 Habitat II Conference in Istanbul did not have much impact on political debates in Germany, where the Habitat Agenda was mostly viewed as an Agenda for the South. The issues discussed at the conference and in the agenda seemed to lack relevance for Germany. In fact, the housing provisions in Germany seem to be relatively good, even in comparison to other European countries, and ecological aspects that used to be a major concern in settlement planning have played a role in most political discourses over the past decades. 

Still, in spite of the country's wealth, its sophisticated social security system and its social and ecological consciousness, over 500.000 people are still homeless in Germany. The growing poorer segment of the population is burdened with increasing housing costs and threatened by a restructuring of the housing policies with the loss of important social housing institutions. On the other hand, and in contrast to predominant political and ecological discourses, the settlement development is still characterised by urban sprawl and land consumption as well as by dramatically shrinking cities in some regions.

The low relevance of the Habitat Agenda in the political discourse of Germany is partially due to the fact that the agenda fails to address some specific issues of housing and urban problems in Europe or the United States. It fails to address the problems of privatisation of public housing, property oriented housing subsidies and their impact on regional development and urban sprawl tendencies, or the specific problem of shrinking cities. Obviously, some commitments of the Habitat Agenda need to be "translated" to fit the actual situations found in European countries (more than this will be the fact in other continents). Hence, the main ideas of the Agenda can easily be related to the existing housing and urban development problems in Germany, which will be presented in this small overview. 

Since the 1996 Istanbul conference, the German government has neither publicly announced a national or local Habitat follow up nor encouraged civil society to take part in such a process. The German Federal Ministry of Traffic, Construction and Housing is responsible for this Habitat monitoring. A National Habitat Committee does exist, but it does not include the relevant stakeholders, especially no grass-root representatives and it did not meet between 1997 and 2000. At the end of 2000, the Ministry drafted a version of the "National Report Instanbul+5" based on results of a national urban planners conference of November 1999, but it was written without the participation of relevant NGOs or grass-root representatives. As late as December 2000, the draft was being disseminated among an exclusive circle of institutions and professional chambers. 

Habitat Arbeitskreis Berlin and Habitat Forum Berlin started an independent regional Habitat-Monitoring in January 2001 which assesses the experiences of different local initiatives, grassroot organisations and institutions working in this field. In April 2001 a NGO-Habitat Forum was established in North-Rhine-Westphalia which also works on independent regional reports on habitat-issues. Based on these two initiatives this paper has been put together by the Habitat Initiative Germany, a working group inside the NGO network Forum Umwelt & Entwicklung.

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