AUTOFREI SEIDLUNG
- Claudia Pool
- Sep 21, 2017
- 2 min read
Known as the largest car free settlement in Germany, Autofrei design a community specifically for walking and biking. In total 1,500 people currently live within the settlement within 460 house hold, each one "renouncing" cars as a main mode of transportation. This was made successful by identifying existing transportation options, and allowing cars (if need be) to park outside of the community, in a garage. While this does dim the term "car free", it is was a condition to make the settlement successful. To further expand on the, there is a percentage of the people living their whom drive a car to work everyday, so the question arose as to how car free this truly is. Even in the existing street layout they accounted for cars in the case that the idea didn't work.
Other cases against the settlement have come up, including: a older gentleman whom had to be moved to a retirement home, but had no means to transport 50 boxes by bike or walking out of the settlement. This was resolved by allowing homeowners to drive throughout the settlement for 1 hour.
With the initial proposal of the project, the idea had not seemed this complex, and they had originally intended to have less car interaction than they do now, but people have put pressure on that relationship, causing the original line to have been blurred along the way.
As a person whom visited the site, I found it to be very comfortable. Due to the scale of the design, the inner areas between the buildings was not over bearing, this might be because of the original space for cars, but as it serves humans now, it is nice to have so much room. Long term I could see this becoming a trend. I think that because people are beginning to question their effect on the environment that they will become more self conscious of how they travel. This is the sustainability aspect of the design, it is meant to improve not only the heath of the environment, but also the health of the people. Walking improves ones quality of life, so a whole community based on that could be identified as sustanable.
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