Planning with all your Senses - Learning to Cooperate on a Regional Scale

Planning with all your senses" is an experience as well as advice. This paper is based on the hypothesis that the stimulation of the ba- sic senses and an appeal to beauty and emotions may contribute a great deal to the output and outcome of regional governance. This also helps learning, which is essential in planning in the context of dynamic urban landscapes. There- fore, taking the human senses as well as learn- ing processes into account should be a part of creative governance. The paper explores two cases of facilitation of regional cooperation in Germany. The region of Bonn/Rhein-Sieg/Ahrweiler has - after the Ger- man capital was moved to Berlin in the 1990s - successfully combined the restructuring of the region's economic basis with the develop- ment of new regional planning procedures. The planning and implementation of the first part of the "Regionalpark Saar" was a creative process of cooperation using the "low impact" philoso- phy developed by the SAUL network (SAUL - Sustainable and Accessible Urban Landscapes, funded by the European Regions Interreg III B Programme). The first part of the paper recalls some basic facts that have to be taken into account when thinking about planning in the context of gov- ernance. In part two, a set of basic rules for fa- cilitation on a regional level will be spelled out, because some characteristics are different from working at the urban level. These basic rules will be illustrated in two case studies; one from the Bonn region and one from the Saarland, which will lead to the conclusions about "planning with all your senses".