Ammalia Podlaszewska | CGE e.V Erfurt
A model village of ecological and social sustainability
For decades, Pödelwitz was shaped by open-cast lignite mining – first as a job and later as a threat from dredging and the associated resettlement. The opencast lignite mining has not only torn up the earth, but also eroded and blown away the village community. Most of the residents have left Pödelwitz. However, not everyone wanted to leave. A small group of committed residents and supporters have taken it upon themselves to transform Pödelwitz into an ecological model village for future generations. For 13 years, some residents fought to prevent their village from being mined.
The village must reinvent its identity from the coal phase-out. The community wants to proactively shape the process and play a pioneering role for all the other places in structural change regions that will have to find new ways of living, working and doing business in the coming decades.
They want to co-design this process proactively and take on a pioneering role for all the other places in structural change regions that must find new ways of living, working and doing business in the coming decades. The community formed a small unit that tests social transformation in practice and connects with other unique places that invent sustainable lifestyles. Their ambition is to create a tomorrow worth living – not only in ecological terms, but also in cultural, social and economic terms.
The village (still) has future
Now, large part of the housing stock in the village has been empty since 2016, the original population had during the resettlement, that of large parts of the residents desired and brought about in a multi-stage mediation process, sold their houses under private law to MIBRAG and left the village. The site was then to be demolished and made way for lignite mining. The remaining residents had refused to be resettled and some of them had actively resisted the mining company. Uncertain years followed, marked by political discourses about the future of lignite mining and numerous protest actions. It was not until January 2021 that MIBRAG finally announced in the context of the new district planning that the village would remain. The years of resettlement and resistance up until now can be understood as a continuous process of negotiation, with the work focusing on the current process of redesigning the village.
During the years of resistance, a small group of committed people and residents came together in Pödelwitz who wanted to convert the village into an ecological model village. The plans for this were developed in numerous village meetings based on a concept paper from 2019 and are now available to the city council in Groitzsch. Since 2020, the local group has also been organized as the association Pödelwitz hat Zukunft e.V.
The association “Pödelwitz has a future” is looking into the question of what will happen there. It organizes events such as the “Repair Café” as local initiative. People can have their broken devices or other things repaired there. Such events are intended to show on a small scale how people want to live together in the village. They also developed the idea of combining living-working and leisure. For example, by growing vegetables in the fields of the region and sold them in the village’s shop or processed directly in the village canteen or village café. Additionally, the rural coworking space replaces the daily trip to the Leipzig office and offers a much better infrastructure than the home office with its fast internet, meeting room, communal copier and more. These concepts are intended to radiate into the region and attract people from the surrounding towns.
Kaltofen, the church leader of the village, confirmed that 80 percent of the houses in the village are currently owned by the coal company MIBRAG. The association is considering a cooperative with MIBRAG that would distribute the abandoned houses. The houses affected would now stand empty and fall into disrepair. According to the association, MIBRAG rejected an offer from “Pödelwitz has a future” to purchase an entire street and, in the long term, the entire village through a foundation. On the other hand, MIBRAG wants to enter a dialogue with the municipalities to make joint decisions. However, they are not interested a short-term sale of the properties for the time being. Kaltofen criticizes that everything is taking too long with MIBRAG’s “stalling tactic”, as the remaining residents have a right not to live in a largely empty village for much longer and the building’s conditions are starting to get even worse. At the start of the participation process at the end of September 2023, MIBRAG said to the other participants: Come up with a concept and we’ll see if it suits us.
“Goodbye coal, hello future!”
When it comes to structural change, many people first think of the future. Of renewable energies, new markets and innovative projects. But structural change is not just about new things coming. It is also about old things going. 150 lost villages have given way to brown coal in the Central German region over the past 100 years.
Even after three decades of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany’s exit from lignite seems to be sealed. The four coal-producing states of Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Brandenburg and North Rhine-Westphalia signed an agreement in August 2020 that will launch the first projects to strengthen the regions’ structures. The federal government has made 40 billion euros available for structural change. But the exit from coal raises questions that were already being discussed in the Central German mining areas in 1990.
The town of Pödelwitz will not fall victim to brown coal. As the Mitteldeutsche Braunkohlengesellschaft (MIBRAG), the operator of the open-cast mine, announced. The Saxon Ministry of Economic Affairs also confirmed the agreement. In their coalition agreement in 2019, the CDU, Greens and SPD agreed to preserve the towns. However, this had not yet been legally binding. The background to this is Germany’s decision to phase out coal by the end of 2038 and the resulting shortening of the operating life of the Lippendorf coal-fired power plant supplied by MIBRAG to 2035.
The remaining question is: What will be lost because of the phase-out? What will be new?
