Search

This paper presents a study about studentification in the medium-sized university town of Goettingen, Germany. While many studentification studies focus on the transformation of owner-occupied houses into houses of multiple occupation, this study is about displacement in the rental housing market. I argue that within this context, the displacement of marginalised social groups takes place through rental prices and private landlords' preferences for students of higher education. Hence, I focus on how landlords extract high rents from their property without making serious investments and investigate landlords' strategies for increasing their return on investment via higher education student tenants. I explain their strategies, grounding this research in semi-structured interviews with landlords, property managers and real estate agents, complemented by statistical data. I show that different rental strategies landlords apply lead to the separation of different social groups. Hence, this paper argues that the strategies of landlords have an important impact on urban segregation and urban development in cities. Therefore, a deeper investigation of these strategies would help us achieve a better understanding of how the process of studentification proceeds and how displacement takes place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The institutions around which the postwar German model has been constructed have increasingly been questioned both from within and from outside Germany, a transformation process which many observers have interpreted as cultural convergence to the currently hegemonic Anglo-American paradigm. Rather than representing change and resistance in Germany in terms of a transition from one stable cultural container to the other, the paper starts from a position which assumes the existence of different representations of the social economy at any moment in time, frameworks which compete for authority and hegemony. Conceptualizing this negotiation process as being constituted both discursively and materially, the paper shows that what is currently going on in Germany is neither institutional convergence nor sclerosis, but rather a contested process where different beliefs, ideas and views battle for hegemony and which has profound consequences for those subject to it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The partnership principle in the European Union has often been examined in the context of the emergence of a multi-level type of governance. Recently, a number of studies have focused on the implementation of the European Cohesion Policy in the new member states. They have listed the numerous obstacles to its functioning effectively. However, given the shortfalls, they were not in the position to question the entire range of effects of partnership when it does indeed work. Complementary to this approach, this paper starts from the example of a best-practice, looking at the concrete results of the use of partnership to ensure a place-based approach to regional policies. It uses the example of the East-German Land of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, a NUTS II region that benefits from structural funding under the convergence objective. After a brief description of how the partnership principle works on the ground, it examines the conditions of its success. It then analyses its contribution to “good governance”. Lastly, it examines whether this form of partnership rises to the challenge of implementing a place-based approach as defined in the Barca Report. It argues that it neither offers all individuals a chance to become informed and contribute their knowledge or express their preferences about the delivery of projects, which involve the very technical issues of regional development and the disbursement of the structural funds. Nor does it allow control and pressure on policy makers by the citizen. The findings show that, as a consequence, the kind of policies promoted fail to fulfil both the objectives of efficiency and equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article identifies some of the patterns and dynamics that have emerged in the uneven landscape and shifting constellations of local immigration regimes in the wake of the 2015 ‘summer of welcome’. Using the German case, it explores key players and institutions within this urban policy arena, and how their collaborative/competitive interactions in addressing the challenges of (receiving) the many newcomers have been shaped by supra-local as well as contingent and political factors. Firstly, it looks at the role and relative autonomy that municipalities exert in designing (proactive) refugee and integration policies. Out of the broad spectrum of civil society organisations that engage in this field, the paper then focuses on the new civic engagement often referred to as volunteer welcome initiatives, and on another civil society actor less frequently discussed in this context: the protest movement organised by refugees themselves. The evolving practices of, and interrelations among, these three sets of actors illustrate the trajectory of the transforming relations within the city as a networked and contested space of immigration policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent decades have been dominated by discourses describing a resurgence of regions. Yet despite its prominence the region remains a largely Delphian concept. In the period of new regionalist orthodoxy, for example, while it was recognized that regions take various forms, the normative claim that we were living in a ‘regional world’ became narrowly focused on regions as subnational political units. Nevertheless, the emergence of city-regions, cross-border regions, and European Metropolitan Regions is leading some scholars to suggest the formation in this century of a brave new ‘regional world’. With economic, social and political activity increasingly orchestrated through regional spaces that cross-cut the territorial map that prevailed through much of the twentieth century, the literature is adorned with accounts advancing the theoretical and policy rationale for relational approaches to regions and regionalism. Yet far less has been written on the struggle to construct these spaces politically, thereby neglecting questions of territory and territorial politics. With this in mind, our paper draws on the experience of Germany to consider the political struggle to overcome the contradictions, overlaps, and competing tendencies that result from new regional spaces appearing alongside, rather than replacing, existing forms of state scalar organization. In particular, we observe how the Federal State is using the ambiguity of the regional concept to present territorial and relational approaches as complementary alternatives. The paper concludes by relating these findings to ongoing debates on how we, as ‘regional’ researchers, should approach the analysis of regions and regionalism; speculates on the degree to which they form progressive and effective spatial policies; and asks what lessons can be learnt about contemporary state spatiality more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The formation or consolidation of ‘ethnic’ neighbourhoods in European cities has made ethnic/racial differences more visible in urban space and has brought back to the forefront of both academic and political debate questions about the spatial concentration of ‘strangers’ (segregation), citizenship rights and ‘integration’. The women and men who live in the city have, or may claim, a right to the city that includes on the one hand the right to appropriate urban space and on the other hand the right to participate in its production and in decisions about it but also in (re)defining patterns of living it. In this context, migrants reconfigure the meanings of belonging against dominant spatializations through their everyday practices. Moreover, more or less institutionalized forms of political participation create new spatial levels of citizenship not limited to the scale of the nation-state. Interactions among migrants and locals continuously redefine the subject of rights as they activate processes of access, participation and inclusion/exclusion in/from the urban public sphere. This paper discusses these processes and terms, drawing on examples from Berlin and Athens. We focus in particular on neighbouring as the space and resource of belonging and on how this is related to participation and urban citizenship. The two cities offer different contexts in which institutional policies, informal practices and claims for participation at the neighbourhood level define, in different ways, citizenship as a spatial strategy and help qualify the content of the ‘right to the city’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) have evolved as an ‘innovation’ in urban governance supposed to function as a reaction to inner-city decay, emerging suburbs and the transformation of the retail industry owing to so-called ‘malling’ under ‘actually existing neoliberalism’. In the field of security, the interplay of public police and rent-a-cops being directed by ‘institutionalized lobbyism’ represents local governance regimes in exclusionary action. The paper analyses the concept of BIDs with regard to its controversial legal (constitutional), spatial and humanitarian impacts. Evidence for the critical challenges that are brought about by BIDs is taken from case studies in the City of Hamburg, Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At one level, this paper centres on the closure of a steel plant in Germany, the closure and then reprieve of another in the UK and the expansion of a third in China, but at another level this changing geography of steel production can be seen as symptomatic of and symbolizing profound changes in the global manufacturing economy. The closures at Dortmund (permanently) and Redcar/south Teesside (temporarily) both reflected the growing international – not to say global – restructuring of the steel industry and the strategies that steel-producing companies adopted in the face of profound changes in markets and patterns of production and trade. To that extent, at first sight this might appear to be a familiar and not unexpected outcome of those processes. However, the outcomes both at local level and for the steel plants themselves turned out to be very different because they reflected the complexity of global processes and the interacting effects of many influences operating at different spatial scales within the complex social relations of capital. Not least this was because the closure in Dortmund and the ending of steel-making there were directly implicated in a major expansion of steel production in China, by Shagang in Jiangsu Province, via the transfer of a major steel complex, disassembled in Dortmund and reassembled in Jinfeng. The disassembly of a major production complex, its transport to the other side of the world and its reassembly there as functional fixed capital added a dramatic and radical new twist to the meaning of global shift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the recent interest in Berlin in the English-language urban studies journals over the past decade. It argues that welcome though this interest may be, the narrowness of its focus says much about the limitations of current Anglophone urban and regional studies. Following on from the recent set of Euro-commentaries in this journal, and using recent writing on Berlin as a case-study, it suggests Anglophone urban studies has much to gain from: (a) placing greater value on the plurality of Europe's urban tradition; and (b) paying greater attention to the plurality of urban narratives that lie outside the existing analytic consensus within Anglophone urban and regional studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much contemporary writing on cities focuses on their position within wider global networks, so there is a risk of underplaying the significance of other aspects of the urban experience. This paper explores the particular role of Berlin as capital city in the making of the (new) Berliner Republic and the ways in which it is defined (and defines itself) within that Republic. Berlin is the (and often literally the building) site on which a new Germany is being constructed. The making up of the new Berlin is dominated by attempts to reinterpret and reimagine its history: it is a city of memorials and of deliberate absences; of remembering and forgetting, or trying to forget; of reshaping the past as well as trying to build a new future. The juxtapositions of urban experience, the layering of memories and the attempt to imagine a different future come together to define Berlin as a contemporary capital city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the past and future economic situation of Berlin in the German city system. Comparing the shares of employment in various service sectors of total employment in Germany from 1939 to 1997 shows the significant changes in the role as a metropolis. Berlin has lost its dominant position as a consequence of isolation from international development for 40 years. Despite successful expansion and restructuring processes in superregionally oriented services, Berlin is still behind the West German economic centers. Futureoriented perspectives for Berlin cannot be found in a regaining of lost functions, but in developing new fields of international service functions. Berlin's potential therefore is its cultural diversity as a context for productive innovations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization has had a dramatic effect on the way in which we understand the operation of urban systems. Cities — or their elites — have increasingly sought to redefine and reimagine themselves through place marketing in ways which allow them to compete in the global marketplace. The 'exceptional' case of Berlin is explored in the context of regional and global restructuring. Berlin has been at the centre of dramatic changes over the last decade and has been forced to reimagine itself in quite a different set of global understandings. A series of different — competing and sometimes complementary — imaginary Berlins are being constructed in the process of reinsertion into 'normal' capitalist urbanization. The relationships between property-led visions with Berlin at the heart of a wider Europe, visions of Berlin as a revived capital of a united Germany and the redefinition of Berlin as an ordinary place are considered. Each of these visions offers a different interpretation of Berlin. The paper critically assesses the extent to which it is possible to escape from pro-growth agendas in developing an urban future for the city and explores some of the implications of Berlin's current development trajectory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The local regulation of prostitution in Germany is a contested area of urban politics. In this issue area, morality claims intersect with the material interests of home- and landowners and the security demands of 'ordinary' citizens. The Prostitution Law of 2001 has liberalized the legal framework: the legislation 'normalized' sex work, triggering the re-definition of urban strategies to regulate prostitution. This article analyses the conflict dynamics and the framing of conflicts over regulations in four German cities. It identifies the main actors, coalition-building processes and the framing of conflicts, and links these elements to the resulting policies. With regard to theory, it explores the relevance of classical explanatory approaches to local governance such as party politics, urban growth coalitions, political culture and bureaucratic politics to the value-laden issue of prostitution. It thereby contributes to the growing academic interest in the nature of morality policies and the question of the specific conditions under which prostitution is framed as a moral issue or as a 'normal' subject within urban politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The governance of metropolitan affairs emerges as one of the crucial issues in many countries. The academic debate shows a bias towards categories and descriptions based on North American and, to a lesser degree, West European experiences. Based on the results of comparative research on metropolitan regions in Germany and in Poland, we can say that there is much more diversity than convergence in the practice of regional reform in the studied cases. Moreover, the normative and analytical framework of the new regionalism is not as appropriate to describe the Polish and – to a lesser extent – the German metropolitan reality as it is widely assumed. Recently emerging metropolitan arrangements bear the features of novelty, but at the same time most of them still lean strongly on governmental premises. Surprisingly, despite obvious differences between the two countries, some cross-national similarities are noticeable between the metropolises, which share some characteristics such as the position of a front-runner in the national economy or the national exponent in the global city hierarchy. The main difference can be identified in the economic focus of the metropolitan governance arrangements. Whereas this is a dominant approach in German city-regions, in Poland it still remains low on the agenda, at least in practice. Moreover the involvement of non-governmental actors in metropolitan initiatives is much lower in Poland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As trust is essential for close mutual cooperation, trust between entrepreneurs running SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) has been increasingly acknowledged as an important factor in regional economic development. However, one of the main problems of post-socialist economies is that the increased need for entrepreneurial trust is thwarted by conditions discouraging the creation of trust. In order to investigate this problem, an empirical study was carried out among 1CT entrepreneurs in eastern Germany to examine the main aspects of trust identified in the recent literature on SMEs and entrepreneurship. The findings revealed that although barriers impeding the emergence of inter-entrepreneurial trust do not necessarily exist in a lagging, transforming region such as eastern Germany, its development may prove more difficult than elsewhere. Problems can be attributed to 'legacies of socialism' in the knowledge patterns of `post-socialist entrepreneurs' and, more importantly, their perception of a general lack of market power. However, actual problems of building entrepreneurial trust can usually be resolved by careful reflection on the part of those concerned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the background of recent debates on state spatial restructuring in the European Union (EU), this article elaborates a critical geographical interpretation of the contemporary debate on locational competitiveness (Standortdebatte) in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). On the one hand, the current debate on Standort Deutschland (Germany as an investment location) represents the growing instability of the 'Rhine model' of capitalism under conditions of accelerating globalization and European integration. In this aspect, the contemporary locational debate has served to justify various forms of deregulation and institutional erosion at each level within the German political system. On the other hand, the contemporary locational debate has also entailed the delineation of new subnational geographical targets for major socio-economic policies. The protection and enhancement of nationally specific competitive advantages within an integrated European economy is increasingly seen to hinge upon the construction of 'Euro-regions' associated with territorially specific conditions of production, socio-economic assets and institutional forms at subnational scales. The politics of deregulation in post-unification Germany have therefore been closely intertwined with a broader reterritorialization and re-scaling of state power in which new subnational institutional spaces are being mobilized as the geographical spearheads for renewed economic growth. These arguments are illustrated with reference to two major realms of debate on locational competitiveness in the post-unification era, each of which has entailed a distinctive scalar articulation of neoliberal political agendas: the regionalization of national spatial planning policies (Raumordnungspolitik); and the debate on 'competition federalism' (Wettbewerbs-föderalismus) and fiscal equalization (Finanzausgleich) among the German Länder. However, against essentializing... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1990, the date of German reunification, urban development, and especially the recovery of inner cities in East Germany, has been delayed by several factors including real estate restitution claims, inflexible preservation codes for historic buildings, and the shortage of stores for retailers. This blockade situation has resulted in the quick and intensified development of shopping centres as ‘inner city substitutes’ on the urban periphery. The combined effect of the factors preventing revitalization strategies and the newly realized and practised potential for autonomous action by the authorities of smaller municipalities has been to severely restrict the governing capacities of the authorities of the larger cities. In regaining their capability city governments are dependent on urban groups joining and supporting public developmental strategies. Such groups can be described as urban regimes. In Germany three types of regime can be differentiated. The cities differ with respect to the political strength and the forms of coalition and conflict between different urban regimes. Specific conditions in East Germany have led to a special regime constellation with a powerful ‘conservation regime’ on the one hand and a vivid ‘globalization regime’ on the other. This conflicting constellation results in a developmental blockade. The hypothesis is that a third regime type, the ‘local alliance', is missing and still has to be created by practices such as city marketing and city management. Only when this regime-building process has advanced will new constellations of political coalitions and compromise become possible and be able to reduce governance problems of city government in the long run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Berlin's reinstatement as the capital of Germany has raised great expectations of its transformation into a major European metropolis. Some people even claim that Berlin is moving in the direction of becoming a 'global city'. A more common interpretation of the structural changes in Berlin's economy sees the current developments in the regional economy as a process of structural adjustment with the West German metropolitan regions, assuming that Berlin is in transition to catch up with the economic centres of the poly-central German regional system. This position is highly questionable, since first it ignores the overall trend towards a polarization between urban regions in terms of their economic performance, their different sectoral specialization profiles and innovative capacity; and second it is based on a highly simplified concept of the metropolitan regions' economic structure, the concept of a 'service metropolis'. The purpose of this article is to undertake a critical appraisal of the vision of Berlin as a service metropolis through empirical observation of sectoral trends and specialization profiles in four metropolitan regions of Germany. The comparative analysis of Berlin and major metropolitan regions in Germany comes to the conclusion that the notion of a common development path of metropolitan regions' economies is misleading. In contrast to the structural adjustment thesis, the development of Berlin in the 1990s might be better characterized as an 'open-ended' structural break. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]