A HOME TURNS NEWCOMERS INTO LOCALS

People from 179 nations live in Frankfurt. They come to work, study, start companies and raise families. They bring ideas, skills and new perspectives to our region. We want them to stay.

But belonging also means being able to afford a home and still have money left for restaurants, culture, sport, friends and everything that makes a city worth living in.

Frankfurt needs more affordable housing. But it does not necessarily need more land.

Much of the space we need is already here.

Empty offices. Commercial buildings that no longer fit the market. Properties built for another time and another way of working.

They can have a second life.

THE FUTURE IS BUILT ON WHAT’S ALREADY HERE.

Across advanced economies, around 80 percent of the buildings that will still be in use in 2050 have already been built. That changes the question.

We cannot build our way into a sustainable future through new construction alone. We have to make much better use of what already exists.

Convert offices into homes. Turn monofunctional business districts into mixed neighbourhoods. Combine housing with workplaces, schools, nurseries and places where people meet.

And we need to make the buildings themselves perform better. Because Frankfurt has set itself another ambitious target:

FRANKFURT WANTS TO BE CLIMATE-NEUTRAL BY 2035.

That is less than a decade away. The goal is ambitious. But the existing building stock also represents an enormous opportunity.

Before replacing facades, heating systems and entire technical infrastructures, we should first understand what a building already has and how efficiently it actually works.

Many buildings contain sophisticated technology. Heating, cooling, ventilation, lighting, sensors and control systems are already installed.

The problem: they often do not work together. A building can heat one area while another system is trying to cool it. Ventilation can run although floors are empty. Systems follow fixed schedules instead of actual demand. The technology is there. What is missing is intelligent coordination.

MORE THAN 50% LESS ENERGY.

A real existing commercial building shows what can be possible.Its existing building technology was digitally connected and coordinated. Heating, cooling, ventilation and control systems were managed as one system and continuously adjusted to actual demand. The documented result:

51% LESS ENERGY CONSUMPTION.

And this was achieved without replacing the entire building technology. That does not mean every building will save 51 percent. Every property is different.

But it proves an important point: Before we replace what already exists, we should make it work better.

Measure first. Understand the building. Connect the systems. Reduce unnecessary consumption. Then determine which additional investments are really needed. This changes the economics of transformation.

Less energy means lower operating costs and lower CO₂ emissions. It can also mean that less capital is required to bring an existing building much closer to climate-neutral operation.

EFFICIENCY FIRST. INVESTMENT WHERE IT MATTERS.

And there is another lesson. For decades, companies have learned to manage their digital infrastructure continuously. Networks are monitored, systems communicate with each other and performance is constantly optimised.

Why should a large building be different? A modern building should not simply be renovated once and then left to run for the next 20 years.

It should learn. It should be measured. And it should continuously perform better.

ONE BUILDING IS A CASE. THOUSANDS OF BUILDINGS CHANGE A CITY.

The real opportunity is therefore not one spectacular smart building. It is scale.

Imagine office towers, schools, residential buildings and commercial properties across FrankfurtRhineMain using less energy because what is already installed works better together.

Imagine vacant offices becoming homes while their operating costs fall. Imagine owners being able to see what their buildings consume, where energy is lost and which investment will deliver the greatest effect.

That is how climate protection becomes economically attractive. And that is how an ambitious target such as climate neutrality by 2035 becomes more tangible: building by building, street by street, neighbourhood by neighbourhood.

2035 CAN BE MORE THAN A TARGET.

We believe FrankfurtRhineMain should use the coming years as a real-life laboratory for the transformation of the existing city. That idea reaches beyond Frankfurt.

Athen, Paris, New York, Tokyo and many other mature metropolitan regions face the same challenge: millions of buildings already exist, while cities need more housing, lower emissions and economically viable solutions.

FrankfurtRhineMain can demonstrate how these goals can work together. Not in a model city built somewhere from scratch. Here. In the city we already have. That is also our idea for EXPO35. What if an EXPO did not begin with constructing a new exhibition site? What if the transformation itself became the exhibition?

Homes created from vacant offices. Existing buildings consuming dramatically less energy. New neighbourhoods emerging from places that had lost their original purpose.

A metropolitan region changing visibly over the course of the next decade.

2035 IS THE TARGET. THE TRANSFORMATION STARTS NOW.

THE NEW FRANKFURT is therefore calling for better conditions to transform existing buildings and create more affordable housing across FrankfurtRhineMain. Our petition runs until 20 February 2027.

THE NEW FRANKFURT

An independent real-world laboratory

initiated by CNTXT8 GmbH

Peter Pawelski & Maximilian Deutschmann Co-Initiators

www.THE-NEW-FRANKFURT.de

THE FUTURE IS BUILT ON WHAT’S ALREADY HERE.

LET’S TALK ABOUT THE BUILDINGS WE ALREADY HAVE.

Peter Pawelski
Founder & CEO | CNTXT8 GmbH Co-Initiator
THE NEW FRANKFURT
Peter.pawelski@cntxt8.de
CNTXT8.de
LinkedIn: Peter Pawelski

CNTXT8 GmbH | Frankfurt am Main
Bankability as a System