Profile
Rüdiger FleckArchitect and urban designer
Profile
Rüdiger Fleck spent the 1990s building something the vocabulary didn’t exist for yet: residential settlements that produce their own energy, close their own water and nutrient loops, and are owned by the people who live in them. After a long interruption, he is putting that experience back to work.
Full CV & work register- Discipline
- Architecture & urban design
- Focus
- Regenerative settlements · building in the existing fabric
- Based in
- Lübeck, Germany
- Active since
- 1989
Settlements as systems
Between 1990 and 2000 he planned and built a series of settlements around closed cycles of energy, water and nutrients — ten units in Bad Schwartau, twenty-four in Stockelsdorf, around a hundred and twenty in Lübeck. The buildings were only half of the task: a cycle needs shared plant, a building to house it, an ownership structure to run it, and an urban form in which all of that coexists with everyday life. Designing that whole was the actual work.
The largest of the settlements was registered for World Expo 2000, funded as a federal pilot project, and documented by the United Nations as a best-practice case study.
Scale and ownership
The argument behind the settlements is one of scale: energy, water and heat are best organised at the level of the neighbourhood — above the single house, below the municipal network. That is no argument against cities. A city bundles small units into quarters, and always has.
And shared systems survive, in his experience, when the people who use them own them. Common infrastructure rarely fails on technical grounds; it fails when nobody feels responsible. Tying the plant to its residents is as much a part of the design as the pipework.
What operation taught me
The settlements have now been running for a quarter of a century, and the operating record — measured consumption, costs, failure modes — is part of my working capital. It shows where closed cycles outperform conventional infrastructure, and just as precisely where they are brittle. That keeps the case for building this way an engineering argument rather than an article of faith.
My practice today
I work in the existing built fabric: measured surveys, as-built documentation, renovation and conversion planning — increasingly in BIM, so that survey data becomes a model other planners can work in directly. I run a deliberately one-person office in Lübeck’s old town, drawing on a project-based network rather than staff, as my earlier work in Estonia and Denmark did.
The settlements’ habit of accounting — what a building takes in, what it gives out, what is worth keeping — carries straight into this work. And I want to pass on what the settlements taught: to planners, to building groups, to anyone trying to run infrastructure at the scale of a neighbourhood.
The idea
Human settlement has a characteristic size. Infrastructure ought to be designed at that size — not against it.
Rüdiger Fleck — on building at the scale of a village.
Approach
The whole, in practice
Every project here is planned as a system — and a good system is four things at once. Take away any one and the loop won’t close.
Living
A house is not finished at handover; that is when it starts living. Whatever technology a settlement carries, the everyday of the people in it — heating, mending, deciding together — has to carry it. So I plan from the inhabitant outward.
Circular
Water, heat, nutrients and material usually pass through a settlement once — a supply problem on one side, a disposal problem on the other. A loop resolves both, and it closes only above the single house: it needs neighbours, shared plant, an owner. I design the loop first, then the buildings within it.
Regenerative
Reducing harm only slows depletion; nothing recovers by being damaged more slowly. A system is regenerative when its outputs become inputs again — when what leaves the settlement feeds soil, plants or the grid. The design task is the return path.
Rooted
A standing building holds material, energy and work paid for decades ago; tearing it down throws a closed loop away. Renovation is circuit thinking applied across time — building onward with what earlier generations built, beginning with a careful measure of what is actually there.
Case studies