Uploaded on 2017-04-22 by Mira Kopp

The most important stocks for Bielefeld are the forest with its wood and possibilities for relaxation, the people working in social institutions of the city and the stored information and knowledge of companies which build machines, having its centre in the headquarters of Gildemeister and Miele. Another stock is the land of Bielefeld. The shape of the land is not importantly changing, but the use of the land is continuously changing and bears great opportunities. There is a lot of agriculturally used land in the Hinterland and the city is quite broad spread with only a few skyscrapers and many parks and green areas. Yet, a lot of this „green land“ is more and more being transformed into spaces used for cars and big family houses. There is also a flow information due Bielefeld’s University as well as exhibition places like the Kunsthalle Bielefeld (which attracted many famous artists like Yoko Ono and Philip Johnson), schools and people’s minds. Energy-wise our most important flow is the stream and the water reservoir and the biomass in the outdoors of Bielefeld. Capital is another flow due to big companies like Oetker and Gildemeister which also fund a lot of cultural institutions in Bielefeld. But it can also be seen as a stock of rich families which inherited money from generation to generation and invested it into houses and machines. There is not a heavy flow of people, but those coming to and leaving Bielefeld contribute to the flow of information and capital. The flow of people is enhanced through a good train connection, since Bielefeld is part of Germany’s speed train network. In the future Bielefeld should definitely keep it’s forest and enhance the tourist information for this forest. Moreover, instead of transforming parks into car parks, we should better extend our public transport system and make the use of public transport more attractive by e.g. enhancing the ticketing system or installing a good ride+bike. Because in this case, we could use the parks not only for recreation but also food growing and thus shorten the transport distances. And also a better speed train connection to the European network would help. Until now we’re only connected to the German system but there is no speed trains to the Netherland (in spite of the short distance) or e.g. France or Denmark. This would not only be a profit concerning tourism but also for the big capital owners Oetker and Gildemeister. Moreover instead of importing energy, we should better make the most of the water streams and wind we have. And finally to make the city even more attractive, especially concerning information exchange and people flow, we it would be great to make more of Bielefeld’s University which has the reputation of being a quite liberal university, but still the majority of the students come from Bielefeld’s Hinterland and not from other big German cities.