Vauban, Freiburg — A Parking-Free Neighbourhood Built With Its Future Residents

Vauban is a former French military site in southern Freiburg redeveloped from the mid-1990s as a district of about 5,500 residents in 2,472 households. The city council and the citizens' association Forum Vauban co-designed a traffic concept in which most streets are car-free or parking-free, residents who own a car buy a space in peripheral garages, and housing is delivered partly through small resident building groups.
The City of Freiburg's information boards, citing its 2013 statistical yearbook, report a car density of 172 per 1,000 inhabitants in Vauban. Press reports quote 150 and 220 per 1,000 against 430 and 520 for Freiburg as a whole, so the exact figure depends on source and year. A German Aerospace Centre study (Nobis, 2003) examined how car-free housing districts change mobility behaviour; secondary accounts say just over half of households owned a car and that many car-free households had given up their car on moving in.
Caveats: there is no controlled before-and-after evaluation; the population is young (average age about 28.7 years) and largely better-off; and the model relies on Freiburg's tram and cycle network. As an urban experiment it is best read as a well-documented but self-selected case, not proof that the approach transfers to car-dependent suburbs.

Read the full analysis: https://www.freiburg.de/pb/site/Freiburg/get/params_E975311539/647912/Infotafeln_Vauban_de.pdf