The city Salzgitter is located in southeastern Lower Saxony north of the Harz and south of the Lüneburg Heath. It was founded in 1942 by founding act and still exists today from 31 z.T. relatively distant districts. The urban area covers 224 square kilometers and has a north-south extension of 22 kilometers and an east-west extension of 19 kilometers.
House line in the Ostsiedlung,
Salzgitter bath
Their development and naming is closely related to historical salt finds, but also to the ore deposits that formed the basis for the development of the city of Salzgitter during the Nazi era.
Under the special political circumstances of the 1930s and the associated ideological ideas, the raw material area at that time in the middle of Germany offered ideal conditions for founding a city under the banner of industrial iron ore mining and processing. The Reichswerke «Hermann Göring» were founded in 1937, at that time Salzgitter counted 19,500 inhabitants. An industrial center with 250,000 people was planned. In 1939, Salzgitter already had 46,000 inhabitants, and by 1950 the population had increased to 100,000.
Although iron ore is no longer extracted in Salzgitter, foreign ore is still smelted and processed into steel products. With approx. 50,000 employees, Salzgitter is the third largest industrial location in Lower Saxony and has numerous globally operating companies. Despite its importance as a business location, the city has already suffered population losses in recent years, alone 6.5% between 1995 and 2003. For the future, a continuing loss of population is expected, which by 2015, the city now has about 110,000 inhabitants on a population of 96,800 will reduce *.
The problems due to persistent population losses are concentrated, as in other pilot cities, in the settlements where rental housing with only suboptimal living standards is offered. In the neighborhoods of Gebhardshagen and Bad, the focus is on housing stocks from the 1930s, and in Lebenstedt those dating back to the 1960s. Individual residential areas have vacancy rates of up to 20%, in some residential buildings up to 60% of the apartments are empty.
In the urban redevelopment process, Salzgitter is facing the challenge of carrying out a city-compatible market adjustment of rental housing stocks in several housing estates from the 1930s and 1960s while at the same time adapting remaining housing offers to today’s residential requirements. Particular attention will have to be given to how the continued demand for homes can be taken into account in the restructuring of housing estates.