For twelve years, Martin Wentz was a member of the Frankfurt magistrate as head of the planning and most recently building department. He turned his back on politics in 2001 – and by his own admission, he is quite happy about it. Today he works as a project developer, consultant and university lecturer. However, he still has a pointed opinion on political developments in Frankfurt, as his lecture on "missed opportunities of urban development" at the Kuratorium Kulturelle Frankfurt showed.

Günter Murr

Editor at the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

  • Follow I follow

It was noticeable to Wentz that he was sometimes uncomfortable talking about events after his retirement from politics, as this is always associated with criticism of his successors. For example, the subway gap closure between Bockenheim and Ginnheim. In 2006, the long-finished planning was overturned. There is still no new route. "We are not one step further. 17 years were wasted," Wentz said. The line could be opened in 2035 at the earliest. "This is a missed opportunity for the transport transition."

Detours instead of fast cycle routes

As a further example, he mentioned the planning of cycle superhighways. "It has been discussed in the region for ten years," he said. But Frankfurt is on the brakes. For a long time, it had not been possible to plan an asphalted route through the city forest for the expressway to Darmstadt because of the resistance of the environmental department. And in the case of the connection to Hanau, there are concerns of nature conservation, because trees would have to be felled on the south side of the Riederwald. "Now Frankfurt has proposed a route with a major detour," criticized Wentz. "It should actually be about a cycle highway."

The new building for the Museum of World Cultures occupies the city even longer. After the first attempt failed in 1992 for financial reasons, a new opportunity arose in 2007. On the former Degussa site, a private developer would have built the museum and rented it to the city. "Then came the envious and the bad guys," Wentz recalls. Some could not have imagined a museum in private hands, which is also not located directly on the museum embankment.

Not only Wentz considers this a missed opportunity, but also today's museum director Eva Raabe, who spoke in the discussion moderated by F.A.Z. editor Rainer Schulze. It still has to work in very cramped conditions today, because the plans for an underground extension developed in 2010 were also shattered. Wentz had seen it coming: "A great design, but a crazy idea." He later proposed in vain a new building in the central park in the Europaviertel.

More and more protests

Why do so many urban development projects fail? "The protests are getting more and more," Wentz said, looking for an explanation. However, it is the task of politics to enforce the common good over individual interests. But it also makes up an insufficient cooperation in the magistrate. "If a department is against a project, then it has died. This is not a good development."

But it is also the task of politics to use favorable time windows, said Wentz. This was the only way to enforce the Deutschherrnviertel on the slaughterhouse grounds during his tenure as head of the planning department. And the new stadium could only be built because the opportunity arose through the 2006 World Cup. Wentz knows that such time windows can close quickly, for example due to changes in majorities as a result of elections. He therefore urged two projects in particular to press ahead quickly in Frankfurt: the construction of the European School on Ratsweg and the new district in the northwest.