The Bremen/Hamburg/Lower Saxony/Schleswig-Holstein regional working group is one of seven regional working groups of the ARL, the Academy for Territorial Development in the Leibniz Association.

The regional working group in northwestern Germany is unique in that it encompasses four states, which also have very different structures: from the second-largest state, Lower Saxony, with its largely municipalised regional planning, to Schleswig-Holstein with its hitherto largely state-run regional planning, as well as the two city states of Hamburg and Bremen, each with its own very distinctive regional cooperation and planning approaches.

This great diversity is also reflected in the range of issues addressed by the Bremen/Hamburg/Lower Saxony/Schleswig-Holstein working group: in addition to questions about development in the differently structured rural areas of the Flächenländer in the north, issues specific to the city states are also discussed.

Title photo by Sebastian Frederik Jacobsen on Unsplash.