Search

Internal migration research is paying increasing attention to the role in migration behaviour of having non‐resident family—family living outside of the household—living close by, and also to non‐migration and staying in general. Combining these two themes, this paper investigates the role of non‐resident family ties in rural staying for adults aged 31–64. Using a mixed methods analysis of survey and interview data from the Netherlands, Germany and Northern Ireland (UK), we examine if the presence of non‐resident family nearby relates to future intentions to stay in the rural region, and we explore the meanings of different family relations and how they relate to past and ongoing staying behaviours. Our findings reveal that living near non‐resident children and in‐laws increases the likelihood of the intention to stay in the rural region for the rest of one's lifetime. While the quantitative analyses suggest that the presence of parents in the area does not contribute to future staying intentions, the interviews revealed that parents' residential proximity was integral in the original staying decision. Non‐resident family members provide emotional and instrumental support, offer location‐specific structural opportunities, and provide a sense of security. Partly, family obligations also play a role in staying, yet not in the sense that rural stayers are 'stuck in place' because of family ties, but rather in an implicit way, intertwined with senses of belonging and attachment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article "Rethinking Public Services in Rural Areas?" discusses the topic of public and private services and infrastructure in rural areas in Germany and other European countries. It discusses changes and challenges regarding the availability, quality, and accessibility of these services and facilities. The Territorial Agenda of the European Union emphasizes the need for measures to maintain public services in rural areas. Various approaches and strategies are discussed to achieve improvements in this area and learn from good examples and practices in other European countries. The text describes various approaches to ensure public services in rural areas. It is shown that state interventions and European funding policies are testing new approaches and launching pilot projects. However, many of these projects fail due to difficulties in implementation and the sustainable establishment of new solutions. The research project InDaLE examined 18 practical projects in different countries and developed theses for the permanent safeguarding of innovative solutions in public services. The main focus of the text presents the state of research on innovative approaches to public services in rural areas and addresses topics such as local supply, social logistics, and the energy transition. Various projects and their experiences are presented to develop new approaches. The article examines the institutional change in the field of fire prevention education and the importance of new cooperations and actor alliances. Based on case studies from Austria and Germany, five essential steps for the long-term establishment of innovative public service projects are identified. Another contribution compares good practices and success factors in after-school education in rural regions of Scotland and Sweden. It shows how rural communities can create attractive offers with limited resources. A third contribution argues that the labor market policy importance of fundamentally economic systems should be considered in the debate on public services. It emphasizes that strengthening these systems requires impulses from municipalities and higher authorities. The article contains a list of scientific publications on the topic of public services in rural areas. The publications address various aspects such as access to healthcare services, local supply, renewable energy, and infrastructure in rural areas. It also compares various countries and their strategies for ensuring public services. The publications provide insights into the challenges and solutions for the provision of services in rural areas. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Raumforschung und Raumordnung is the property of Oekom Verlag GmbH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The question, whether and how spatial and social disadvantages overlap and what this means in terms of individual achievements is of crucial importance to rural sociology. Empirically, however, only few studies on this topical issue are available so far. The paper presents the conceptual and methodological approach as well as selected findings of a recently completed cross-national, German-Czech research project. Our research focusses on three socially disadvantaged groups: persons experiencing difficulties in the labour market, single parents and elderly persons living alone. They are living in four rural peripheries in Eastern Germany and Czechia, regions which are similar in their distance to metropolitan areas, low population density, weak economic structure and poor accessibility of public and private services. Our main interest is on the question whether social and spatial disadvantages accumulate and lead to a double disadvantage. We conducted 113 qualitative interviews in both countries. Overall, most respondents rate their lives in the four regions positively. Often, they describe a rural idyll, naming for example direct access to nature as important source of their well-being. However, they also point to a variety of everyday challenges due to a lack of services and infrastructures and the need to have access to a car and to travel long distances. They highlight the important role played by rural and small towns (and their supply services) in rural peripheries. Social relationships are also important for well-being. The respondents’ everyday narratives attest to the fact that they have found multiple ways of dealing with spatial constraints. Thus, our results paint a nuanced picture of rural peripheries where social and spatial disadvantages do not necessarily accumulate and people do not inevitably see themselves as disadvantaged – either socially or spatially. Central to this is a high degree of agency, manifesting in a variety of coping strategies. The respondents apply these to meet daily challenges and to live more self-determined lives than the spatial structures of a rural periphery and the conditions of various forms of social disadvantage would initially suggest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After its first funding period from 1991 to 1994, LEADER was positively evaluated as a successful strategy to empower actors at the regional level, enable regional development and contribute to territorial cohesion within the European Union. Critical studies, however, have highlighted elitist tendencies in LEADER processes and asked whether the proclaimed goal of strengthening 'the local' contributes to new or other forms of social and spatial injustice. Our research focus lies in how representation, distribution, and recognition—as the three interrelated dimensions of justice according to Nancy Fraser—are featured in the discourse related to redesigning a local development strategy (LDS). During this process, which is conceived as the most open and inclusive phase in each LEADER funding period, we conducted expert interviews and participatory observations in a case study region and gathered media reports, documents, and official regulations. In our analysis of issues of representation, distribution, and recognition, we also focus on the spatial scales that are referred to and the ways in which the involved actors challenge and justify the status quo. Our analysis explicates the actors' implicit normative understandings as well as their different perspectives and positions considering perceived injustice. Even though the LDS process provides opportunities to negotiate these positions and to work towards more just representation, distribution, and recognition, they are partly constrained by structural and individual dependencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces and discusses regional opportunity structures as a concept for analysing the interlinkages between structural conditions in space, social inequalities, and people's agency, with a focus on non-metropolitan areas. The concept adds value in the following ways: (1) it emphasises the regional scale as an important spatial context of access to opportunities; (2) it accounts for the complexity of the regional context, which provides a plethora of opportunities; (3) it recognises the interdependencies of regional effects and other drivers of inequality; and (4) it takes the regional level seriously as a background of the agency of a region's inhabitants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many regions with long-term structural economic and demographic problems, small towns are shrinking as their urban centres, they are losing population, jobs, vibrancy and infrastructure. Yet, knowledge about their trajectories remains vague as studies on urban shrinkage have so far focused on large cities. When monitoring population change of small towns in Germany, there are ambiguous findings concerning their recent development: On the one hand, natural and migration balances were mostly negative and the population is ageing. On the other, they have become target locations of old-age in-migration. Hidden behind general demographic decline, the towns' elderly populations are growing in relative and absolute terms. Our paper wants to shed light on these processes. It draws upon explorative empirical research in small towns in Germany. We will present, firstly, elderly's motivations and actual relocation decisions. Secondly, we will show that these trends remain even largely out of sight of municipal decision makers. By way of conclusion, we argue that urban shrinkage is not a linear but rather a contingent process where overlapping trends, agencies and decisions of various actors together with the more fine-grained unevenness of spatial development can result in unexpected and ambivalent local trajectories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the changes to flood management by exploring a series of reports of catastrophic events exposed errors in both evidence base and governance frameworks. It mentions the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in October 2012 in New York which provides a dramatic image of a global city and world financial centre struggling to cope with disaster. It states that the traditional focus to reduce flood risk was to build flood defences and constrain rivers through hard engineering solutions.

Compared to the well-established concept "vulnerability", there has been less research on "social vulnerability", particularly with respect to highly developed welfare states. Conducting an in-depth study on the consequences of the 2002 Elbe flood in three German communities, the paper tests the applicability of the concept of social vulnerability in a European context. The research was based on the assumption that it is an expression of social inequality. Yet, socially vulnerable groups were not clearly distinguishable. This does not suggest, however, that social vulnerability is not relevant in the European context. Rather, it is the outcome of a complex web of drivers that are of both social and contextual origin. Three implications are outlined for future studies: the need to integrate top-down and bottom-up oriented approaches to assess social vulnerability, to embed our understanding of social vulnerability better in overall societal transformation processes, and to consider existing governance and management systems and their interrelations as well as their consequences for social vulnerability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compared to the well-established concept "vulnerability", there has been less research on "social vulnerability", particularly with respect to highly developed welfare states. Conducting an in-depth study on the consequences of the 2002 Elbe flood in three German communities, the paper tests the applicability of the concept of social vulnerability in a European context. The research was based on the assumption that it is an expression of social inequality. Yet, socially vulnerable groups were not clearly distinguishable. This does not suggest, however, that social vulnerability is not relevant in the European context. Rather, it is the outcome of a complex web of drivers that are of both social and contextual origin. Three implications are outlined for future studies: the need to integrate top-down and bottom-up oriented approaches to assess social vulnerability, to embed our understanding of social vulnerability better in overall societal transformation processes, and to consider existing governance and management systems and their inter-relations as well as their consequences for social vulnerability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After many decades of inner-city decline and massive suburbanization during the post-socialist transition of the 1990s, in eastern Germany there has been recently evolving a new, specific phenomenon: the simultaneousness of shrinkage, fading suburbanization and rising reurbanization. In this paper, the focus is on processes of reurbanization. Starting from a critical debate of conceptual approaches, the paper aims to scrutinize whether reurbanization can serve as an appropriate explanatory framework for the currently changing patterns of spatial development in eastern Germany. Reurbanization is applied to both processes on the urban macro-scale and the meso-scale of inner-city districts. By using regional, local and small-scale data from municipal statistics and questionnaire surveys, reurbanization processes will be analysed mainly for the city of Leipzig. In our paper, we argue that there is evidence for reurbanization in the sense of the model by van den Berg et al. (1982) mainly for some bigger cities since 2000. It occurs as an increasing in-migration as well as diminishing out-migration from the inner city. Taken together, reurbanization processes lead to a stabilization of the housing function of the core city. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examines the changing demography of the Spanish city of León, and aims to explore the manner in which its urban fabric was reshaped by processes of reurbanization, a dynamic whereby the inner city becomes more attractive to a wide variety of household types and social groups. We draw on sociodemographic analyses of municipal census data, as well as a customized questionnaire survey of local residents. Empirical evidence is provided both for the city as a whole and two inner-city districts, Casco Antiguo and El Ejido. Among other findings, it is argued that, although the contiguous built-up area of the city is clearly losing its inhabitants through out-migration and aging, there are a series of small-scale migration flows that increasingly concentrate "nontraditional" households in and around the city center. This is accompanied by an increasing trend toward "city-mindedness" as a residential choice and housing preference among both in-migrants and the long-time residential population. Overall, the evidence points to the emergence of a spatially fragile, fragmented reurbanization process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Processes such as declining and low-level birth rates, ageing, changing household compositions and sizes, as well as growing diversity in households, residents and migration have an increasing imprint on almost every aspect of urban development in Poland and the Czech Republic. This is especially true for the housing market, neighbourhood structures and the demand for technical infrastructure, certain social services and amenities. Inner cities are particularly affected by these changes. Most recently, they have been shifting from areas of long-term decline and ageing to places of repopulation, rejuvenation and increasing housing mobility - processes that only partly find their representation in official statistics and consequently in recent research. The paper analyses processes and patterns of sociodemographic change in East Central European inner cities, using the Polish and Czech second-order cities of Łódź and Brno as examples. It looks at quantitative and qualitative evidence using a mixed-method approach and reflecting empirical findings with the perceptions and priorities of urban practitioners. It argues, among other things, that inner cities in East Central Europe currently face a juxtaposition of persistencies (such as decline and ageing) and changes (such as repopulation and diversification) that lead to a complex pattern of sociodemographic 'de-mixing' and 're-mixing'. For the practice of urban regeneration, such evolving processes urge planners to re-think previous agendas and strategies for inner-city development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary cities in East Central Europe (ECE) represent a hybrid type of urban development which is still generally considered to be a special case and is only exceptionally referred to in the recently intensified debate over the European city. Our paper argues that such exclusion is short-sighted because ECE cities face structural problems similar to those of their Western pendants. Therefore, the contextual frame of urban research needs to be widened and can no longer be restricted to post-socialist transition. In this regard, one of the main challenges for future urban development will be the consequences of demographic change. Ageing, new patterns of fertility behaviour and more diversified household structures in line with the Second Demographic Transition (SDT) will have significant implications for urban structures and housing markets, as already known for Western Europe. The purpose of this paper is to work out new questions and hypotheses for future urban research with special respect to Polish and Czech cities. Besides West European experience, recent developments in eastern Germany are taken as a frame of reference, assuming that this specific transition case may, in many respects, be regarded as a forerunner for similar developments in its neighbouring countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]