Urban Inequalities and Diversities in Germany

Abstract

Germany has emerged over centuries as a central European country marked by political shifts that have resulted in deep regional fragmentation. The polit ical burdens of two world wars led, in the late 1940s, to a separation of the country into the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the western Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), a separation that ended with German (re)unification in 1990. The current federal constitution of Germany, which assigns considerable political power to the country’s 16 independent states (Bundesländer), incorporates several elements of these historical heritages. Consequently, urban developments in Germany reflect the cultural and political backgrounds as historical diversified regions and cities. The first part of this chapter briefly describes these historical impacts on regional and urban developments in Germany. The second part describes the database—the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)—the distinction between urban and rural areas, with variables and measurement designs for (multidimen sional) empirical applications. The third part discusses measurement approaches for the genuine characteristics of urban well-being, and the resulting tensions between inequalities and urban diversities. It goes on to explore fixed-fuzzy approaches to capture (multidimensional) fuzzy-based measures of well-being and deprivation in urban living conditions and documents a new measurement framework using Gini-based inequalities and diversities, with a special focus on (multidimensional) between-group differentiations as inequality-based diversity applications. The fourth part provides empirical results on urban population and income developments. The fifth part discusses further multidimensional results on urban inequality, well-being, and deprivation. The chapter ends by summarizing the conceptual and empirical outcomes (part six) and pointing the way toward further discussions (part seven).