This blog started in Sep 2010, to capture stories from my home village Höfen in Southern Germany, where I was going to live again for one year. I’m now living back in London, and I keep thinking about what is rural.
Self-build is deeply embedded in the local psyche, and most houses are part- or fully self built. It’s not about alternative building techniques or life styles, but simply about getting an affordable house. This efficiency contradicts the planning patterns for the new residential developments. The inner villages have been constructed as quite compact settlements, with plenty of shared walls and short infrastructure routes. The new developments with their detached houses behave a bit like pancakes and spread slightly shapeless across former fields. The rural lacks any over-all planning strategy. Guidelines that exist are mainly to safe and secure an idea of what is a “Frankonian” look – which gets translated into a certain angle of the roof and red coloured roof tiles. I spoke to Mr Gunzelmann from the regional Conservation Board, and he knew that only very recently rural municipalities started to consider more compact developments, and look closer at existing building stock. That’s mainly for economical reasons because the upkeep of compact structures is obviously cheaper. In Höfen there are five empty buildings within the old village, and at least eight large houses with only two residents each. It’s not a village of aging population, but many of the children decide to add their own house.
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