Abstract:

For decades production sites have been pushed out of urban areas due to constraining factors such as emissions, land costs or lack of space. Consequently, industrial sites outside urban areas developed. The emergence of new production processes as well as the shift towards individualized and regionalized customer preferences changes that development recently. New demands concerning urban life quality, attractive work places and an increasing sustainable awareness on the part of society, economy as well as politics promote an increasing (re-) integration of production in urban areas, as partially already observed (Fraunhofer IAO 2015).

For this purpose, options, approaches and system-oriented effects of the paradigm shift towards urban production have to be examined. Recent research has shown the development of a research design that is able to identify key factors of the paradigm shift towards urban production. Basis of the study is a combination of different innovative research methodologies. Both stakeholder and data driven methods are being used (Stiehm et al. 2016). This paper describes the validation of the identified key factors. Here, the focus is on the qualitative densification based on half standardized expert interviews.

Keywords:

Validation, Urban Production, Paradigm Shift, Research Methodology, Research Design, Key Factors, Qualitative Densification, Expert Interviews, Data Driven.