Inner-alpine land is under stress from conflicting land uses like agriculture, industry, housing, and traffic corridors. The transformation of the energy sector to renewables and the need to improve ecosystem services further increase this demand for land. Most of this demand focuses on the permanent settlement area (PSA), which covers roughly 12% of the territory of Tyrol. In most cases, this is met by transforming fertile agricultural land or forests, decreasing the ecological value of the region.

The PSA is the major reference point in discussions about land consumption and the brokering of land by public authorities. However, it is often overlooked, that the technical infrastructure already reaches beyond its perimeter, to access and transform alpine territories outside the PSA. The archipelago of areas outside the PSA is typically functionally programmed by single-use cases like energy storage or ski resorts, resulting in low utilisation rates of the occupied land. Climate warming even threatens to bring an end to some of the latter cases, leaving extensive, serviced footprints with low ecological value wasted.

Many ski resorts are already adapting to a post-ski era, while alpine countries implement limits to the growth of settlements in the valleys, giving more priority to the protection of agricultural and natural land use. The EU has set a net-zero land take goal for 2050. Moreover, cable cars become more widely used as an everyday mode of mass transportation in urban settings. All in all, this is a good time to take a step back and ask about the future relationship between the PSA and its extended territory and the potential it might have for regional development:

1. How can planning integrate the archipelago of serviced areas beyond the PSA to release pressure from valley floors? Are the existing instruments sufficient for that?
2. What functions, social configurations, economic models or building types could thrive there?
3. What would this mean for existing land uses like pastures and alpine ecosystems, and how could they benefit?
4. How could this be a driver for re-naturalising land in the valleys and opening up ecosystem corridors to improve biodiversity alpine-wide?
5. How viable would such a scheme be in the face of increasing natural hazards, induced by climate-change?

This session invites stakeholders, experts, and practitioners to think outside the PSA’s boundaries.

This session is part of the research project “BrokeringSpaces”, which is co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union through the Interreg Alpine Space programme 2021-2027.