Viersen's Plans For Festhalle Area

Viersen City Council has plans for the area around the Festhalle, the specific effects of which the blog will cover over the coming days.

The first major stage is about to be signed off by the Council. It involves the sale of Council land between Wilhelm- and Heimbachstrasse, the grounds of the old Gymnasium. New homes for the old and a car-parking deck are to be built. The car park is necessary because the new building will cover existing parking arrangements, which are already overstretched at busy times and which this new development will likely exacerbate.

The centrist CDU party is saying the development is going too fast. "We don't want another Rathausmarkt," says Fritz Meies in today's Rheinische Post, referring to the controversial buildings which went up there with, apparently, too little political supervision. A working group will be set up to examine the plans in more detail.

In fact, this first part of the council plan seems relatively benign, even if one might question the wisom of enclosing and covering part of one open, single-level car park in order to construct another one, which will be on more levels. Succeeding stages are likely to be more controversial and less attractive to private investment than this first stage.

It might be better if the Council looked at the plans in toto, taking into account not only to its effects on local parking, but on the many existing empty buildings. These abound in the area, several of great architectural refinement and beauty. Private investment, of course, is more attracted to building new large-scale structures than in the painstaking restoration of existing architecture. But in a juster world, the Council would priorise saving existing Jugendstil/Art Nouveau buildings ahead of the more megalomaniac construction of large-scale new buildings, which are invariably of far, far poorer quality.