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  MS Riem:
a community created to be environmentally friendly

"The persons residing in MS Riem will have a high quality of life. "This objective has guided the decade of planning and implementation behind the creation of Munich's newest borough.
'A healthy environment' was defined to be an integral component of a high-quality lifestyle. The creation of such an environment was facilitated by a wide range of municipal authorities and by Munich's Board for Urban Development and Ecology, whose ranks are comprised of leading architects, landscape designers and municipal councilors. These groups had a potent asset to deploy in the creation of a green and gracious environment: virtually all of the property comprised in MS Riem was municipally-owned. This enabled the realization of a masterplan whose main features are:

the allotment of a large expanse of greenery in the community
Nearly half of MS Riem's 560 hectares are covered by its 'landscape park' and other green areas. Extending over 200 hectares in MS Riem's southern reaches, the park was designed by the Paris-based Bureau Latitude. It meets the residents' needs for nature and for space and facilities to play. The residents will swim in the park's lake and sled on its hill. The creation of these green areas was preceded by their remediation and refurbishing. By no means restricted to the green areas themselves, this process enabled the restoration of habitats found in MS Riem in the centuries before it was developed into an airport.

Greenery is not confined to the park, large though it's. A forest is being cultivated in MSRiem's northeast corner. Strips of greenery run through MS Riem's residential and commercial quarters. These, in turn, manifest another central tenet of the masterplan:

the creation of areas meeting and melding economic and environmental needs
All of MS Riem's individual areas enjoy immediate access to water, greenery and other components of nature. Also arrayed adjacent to each other are commercial and residential areas. The objective informing this arraying: to enable residents to find jobs in their immediate neighborhood, obviating the need to commute and the resultant pollution and traffic jams. The jobs are forthcoming from the ever-growing number of companies setting up assembly, distribution and service-related facilities in MS Riem. The melding of economic and environmental imperatives is a central tenet of Agenda 21, the program of action finalized at the UN Conference on Environment and Development, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.

The fairgrounds constitute the largest building in MS Riem. A photovoltaic facility covering 6.6 hectares has been installed in the fairgrounds' roof. It is the largest of its kind in the world. It exemplifies a further feature of the masterplanning:

the fostering of the use of regenerative sources of energy in Messestadt Riem.
Such facilities are also to be found on a number of the roofs of apartment buildings in MS Riem. The buildings themselves have been designed to efficiently employ the energy supplied to them. These energy-conserving features are found in the buildings' interior designs. They go hand-in-hand with the nature-preserving facilities found on or around the buildings' exteriors. The exteriors are designed to be bedecked with greenery. The same holds true for many of the surfaces surrounding the structures. The energy used in MS Riem stems from cogeneration, geothermal and other environmentally-friendly facilities. It is conveyed to the quarter's buildings by district heating system. All told, this constitutes a state-of-technology system.

 

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