55The center of the city has the highest density of development and it is sur-
rounded by a belt of nineteenth-century developments that are supplemented and,
where necessary, completed with new Siedlungen. The Siedlungof Bornheimer
Hang, for instance, completes the eastern side of this belt. Architecturally the “out-
skirts” of this Siedlungwere given details that are reminiscent of a medieval rampart:
on the ridge of the hill, the east side of which remained undeveloped otherwise, a
continuous development was built with alternately three and four stories. These first
“outskirts,” however, do not constitute the outer boundary of the city; instead they
mark the beginning of the greenbelt that is an integral part of the urban area. Where
an initial development already existed around the radial exit routes, an additional de-
velopment was provided, punctuating the greenbelt with built-up areas. Numerous
smaller projects of Das Neue Frankfurt, including, for instance, the Siedlungof Lin-
denbaum (where Walter Gropius was responsible for the architecture), form part of
this addition to a radial development. Finally, the larger Siedlungenin Westhausen,
Praunheim, and Römerstadt to the west and Riederwald to the east belong to the
outer “ring” of the city, constituting so-called Vorortstrabanten—suburbs which are
related to the city but which also exist as entities in their own right. In the spots
where this ring verges on the Main we find the industrial terrains—that of Fechen-
heim in the east and Höchst in the west. To the south of the Main the ring is broken,
making way for the Stadtswald.
All this means that the city has to be read as a whole and that the greenbelt
should be regarded as a complex of “city parks” rather than as a nonurban area situ-
ated between the nucleus of the city and the Trabanten.^72 This reading goes against
the interpretation of the Siedlungenas “islands” that have nothing in common with
the existing city. From the interplay of morphology and architectural formal idiom at
every level, one can clearly see that the aim was to treat the city as a whole and to54
24Axonometric scheme of the
Siedlungof Römerstadt, 1927.