“Luitpoldpark School Campus”: Cooperative Project of the Associate Professorship of Didactics in Sport and Health with the City of Munich

Since 2014, the City of Munich has been investing around ten billion euros in the renovation, expansion, and construction of school infrastructure as part of its school building initiative. This is accompanied by the challenge of creating functional educational spaces in urban areas without losing sight of ecological requirements. This conflict of objectives is particularly evident at inner-city school locations, where limited space, high usage demands, and climate-related ecological requirements must all be considered simultaneously.

This is precisely where the cooperative project “Luitpoldpark School Campus” between the Associate Professorship of Didactics in Sport and Health and the City of Munich begins. The central question is how school sports facilities can in future be designed more flexibly, resource-efficiently, and more closely aligned with the actual needs of contemporary physical education. The basis for this is a scientific analysis of the current LehrplanPLUS curriculum in physical education.

“Although the project was highly demanding due to the many stakeholders and disciplines involved, the cooperation allowed us not only to gain entirely new perspectives on the topics of movement – health – municipal space. In addition, we succeeded in linking scientific findings with practical relevance,” explains Prof. Dr. Filip Mess, Head of the Associate Professorship of Didactics in Sport and Health. “Not least, we can also integrate these findings directly into our teacher education courses and thus enable future physical education teachers to participate in these developments.”

Innovative Sports Facilities for the Luitpoldpark School Campus

Since the beginning of 2023, the working group has been involved in the feasibility study for the school campus at Luitpoldpark. On the site in Schwabing, movement opportunities and spatial concepts are being developed for two future grammar schools (Gymnasien) and one secondary school (Realschule). Due to the high demand for renovation and expansion, the project is one of the city’s larger municipal educational construction projects.

Within the interdisciplinary planning team, the Associate Professorship of Didactics in Sport and Health is responsible for rethinking school movement and sports spaces from a didactic perspective. The goal is to combine formal physical education, informal movement opportunities, health aspects, and ecological requirements within one integrated spatial concept.

The starting point of the scientific work was the analysis of existing standard spatial programs for school sports facilities. In many places, these are still based on planning principles from the 1970s and provide for large-scale sports areas such as grass playing fields or hard courts. However, the evaluation of LehrplanPLUS showed that many of these spaces, in their current size and number, are not necessarily required for the implementation of modern school sports.

Dr. Jan Schmid-Ellinger, research associate at the Associate Professorship of Didactics in Sport and Health, emphasizes: “The analysis of LehrplanPLUS shows that school sports spaces can today be conceived differently than they were a few decades ago. It is no longer only about providing as many traditional sports facilities as possible, but about creating spaces that meaningfully combine movement, health, and social stay.”

Less Sealing, More Flexibility

Instead of large-scale sports facilities, an alternative concept with smaller, multifunctional movement areas was developed. This significantly reduces sealed surfaces while preserving more existing trees and creating additional open spaces for quality of stay, shading, and climate-adapted design.

The central insight: “Today, school sports are no longer so strongly focused on teaching individual sports disciplines,” says Dr. Schmid-Ellinger. “Rather, the aim is to motivate children toward lifelong physical activity and to create spaces that support exactly that.”

A Model for Future School Construction Projects

The project at Luitpoldpark has model character because, for the first time, it examines exemplarily how alternative school sports spaces can be implemented on the basis of the curriculum without fundamentally replacing the existing standard spatial program.

At the same time, the Associate Professorship of Didactics in Sport and Health is already working on another school site in the Moosach district. There, a primary school is being expanded as part of urban residential densification. Here too, the limited site conditions allow only restricted implementation of conventional sports facilities.

The working group is therefore currently analyzing LehrplanPLUS for primary and lower secondary schools in order to develop alternative spatial concepts for these school types as well. The goal is to provide scientifically sound foundations by mid-2026 that can be incorporated into further school construction projects in the city.

A Scientific Perspective on School Movement Spaces

The project demonstrates how sport didactics research can be directly integrated into municipal planning processes. At the same time, it shows that school movement spaces in future will not only be viewed from a functional perspective, but increasingly understood as part of health-promoting, ecologically compatible, and urban-integrated educational environments.

“We understand the project as an exemplary implementation case. It shows that alternative solutions are possible when school needs are consistently derived from the curriculum while simultaneously taking ecological and urban planning requirements into account,” Schmid-Ellinger concludes.

To the Homepage of the Associate Professorship of Didactics in Sport and Health
To the Project-homepage: “Luitpoldpark School Campus”

Contact

Prof. Dr. Filip Mess
Associate Professorship of Didactics in Sport and Health
Am Olympiacampus 11
80809 Munich
Phone: +49 89 289 24520
E-mail: filip.mess(at)tum.de

Dr. Jan Schmid-Ellinger
Associate Professorship of Didactics in Sport and Health
Am Olympiacampus 11
80809 Munich
Phone: +49 89 289 24974
E-mail: jan.ellinger(at)tum.de

Text: Bastian Daneyko
Photos: Private/ChatGPT