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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]

The article reports on demographic changes and dynamics of reurbanisation observed in the rise of inner cities in Europe after a period of decline. It defines reurbanisation as a diversification process of inner cities by people coming from different socio-economic backgrounds. It also states that urban resurgence and city revival have affected the development of new cities in Europe. Moreover, it presents typologies relative to resurgent conditions of urban areas.

After a decade of tremendous population loss indicating severe decline, some large east German cities have been displaying signs of reurbanisation since the late 1990s. Using the city of Leipzig as an example, this paper identifies the major characteristics, progress and underlying spatio-temporal dynamics of reurbanisation, and examines whether it is a long-term process of urban living or features only short-term tendencies. Socio-demographic indicators are used to observe the development of inner-city districts. At the spatial scale of municipal districts, time-series data are analysed for the years 1993 to 2005. The paper argues that reurbanisation has occurred primarily in inner-city districts and has progressed considerably since the early 1990s. However, the spatio-temporal distribution of the relevant indicators shows that reurbanisation is far from being a homogeneous process. In light of this, the paper presents a ring of reurbanisation-sensitive municipal districts around the city centre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyse the appropriateness of monitoring approaches for the observation of inner-city reurbanization processes. Reurbanization is conceptualized here as a process of long-term stabilization of inner-city areas by both a readiness of present residents to stay and an influx of new residents. It has been recently re-set on the top of the European urban research agenda since non-growth has proved to be a major path of future development for many European cities. Recent research evidence across Europe underscores the fact that reurbanization depends much on local settings of institutional, socio-economic and infrastructural factors. To foster a clearer understanding of the nature and dynamics of local reurbanization, to assess its extent and progress and, what is more, to help practitioners to shape sustainable policy initiatives appropriate to the respective context, reurbanization needs to be observed over the long term. The complex character of reurbanization sets new challenges for monitoring approaches and indicator-based tools. Due to the genuine relation of the present debate on reurbanization to the phenomenon of non-growth or the return of the compact city, the focus in this paper is set on demographic development trends and their impact on inner-city change. In this vein, our paper presents a monitoring design and a respective newly developed indicator set for reurbanization which focuses more on the initial recognition of reurbanization than on its long-term stability. Methodically, chances and limits of the integration of household-related indicators and qualitative knowledge on reurbanization into monitoring tools are highlighted. Empirical and statistical evidence is taken from a recently completed EU FP 5 research project and from municipal surveys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]