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In recent years, rural residents' participation within their local communities has attracted attention within scientific and political debates that focus on sustaining or improving the quality of life in villages. Retired older people feature centrally in these discussions, as they are perceived to have the time and life experience to participate in various local activities. This paper contributes to the existing literature through an examination of older villagers' participation and non-participation within their communities in a strongly ageing rural area in Germany. Applying mixed methods and using survey data compiled for older residents, we identified six groups differentiated according to four types of participative practices and two main rationales for non-participation within villages in this region, thus introducing nuances and complexity to both sides of the participation/non-participation dichotomy. Our comparison of these six groups, considering their socio-economic characteristics and residential histories, revealed that women were underrepresented in positions of responsibility and that poor health and advanced age were primary reasons for non-participation. There were minor differences in the participation of village stayers and incomers, who accounted for a larger share of non-participants. As strategies to sustain or improve local quality of life should accommodate the interests of all residents, we advocate raising awareness regarding non-participant groups within research and policy contexts. • Around 75% of older people participate in various ways in their local communities. • Health concerns and advanced age are key reasons for non-participation. • Village stayers and incomers equally accept responsible positions. • Large proportions of non-participants are incomers and women. [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]

This article presents a reconstructive analysis of village research conducted in Germany between 1952 and 2015. For more than 60 years, information was gathered to document socioeconomic and demographic developments in ten West German villages. In the early 1990s, four East German villages became part of that trend study as well. While the material (e.g., surveys, statistics, and field notes) is fragmented and heterogeneous, it nevertheless provides a unique opportunity for reflection on the changing latent concepts, ideas and motives at work in rural research throughout the years. In this paper, we want to reconstruct changing perspectives on the topos 'village' by focussing on three issues: (i) concepts of and attitudes towards village life, (ii) the roles assigned to the inhabitants in developing the village, and (iii) the role of science in providing policy advice. We can show how over time, the focus of the research shifted from an infrastructure-oriented perspective, overcoming 'rural backwardness' to focus on the village by asking about distinct local practices and identities. Concomitant to the changing view on the inhabitants' agency, perspectives on development strategies and policy recommendations changed from exogenous to endogenous approaches. The trend study in retrospect highlights how local development in its complexity is often beyond political steering or researchers' predictions. • Analysis of over 60 years of village research in Germany. • Concept of "village" has gained complexity. • Farming-families' position changed tremendously. • Perspective changes from urban-normativity towards the normality of the village. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within just a few years, land-use conflicts have become considerably more acute in Germany, mainly due to recent changes in the national energy policy. Land users have become much more aware that land is a limited resource, and this has led to competition among the following land-use sectors: settlements/transportation, agriculture, forestry and conservation. To tackle the conflicts and to develop measures for multifunctional land-use, it is necessary to know about the conflicting issues. Stakeholders involved in land-use decisions are an important source of information that can be used to explore these conflicts. This paper shows and explains recent land-use conflicts based on stakeholder interviews and notes the central land-use conflicts in Germany on national and regional levels. [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]

Flat sharers are one of the most distinct representatives of the ‘new’ household types, but have received only very limited attention from researchers. Back in the 1960s shared flats were usually founded with a strong ideological impetus, whereas flat sharing nowadays is just one household type among many others. Typically, this housing arrangement consists of at least two young adult individuals without children. Sharing the flat and the housing costs is the basis of their relationship but living with others is an additional motive. As a rule, flat sharing bridges two distinct events in the course of one’s life: the leaving of the parental home and the foundation of the first independent household. Thus for a restricted period in time, it is a flexible household type adapted to the situational needs of its members. Germany has one of the strongest and longest traditions of flat sharing in Europe, especially among university students. An explorative study was conducted in Leipzig to come to a deeper understanding of what flat sharing means in its ambivalence of being both an economic unit and a social arrangement. Based on qualitative and quantitative evidence from group discussions and Internet adverts, we shed light on the highly under-researched social practice of flat sharing. We will show that despite the structural flexibility of this household type, there is also evidence for its socio-demographic selectivity, spatial concentration and temporal limitation over the individual life courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]