UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Urban decline within the region: Understanding the intra-regional differentiation in urban population development in the declining regions Saarland and Southern-Limburg Hoekveld, J.J. Publication date 2014 Document Version Final published version Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Hoekveld, J. J. (2014). Urban decline within the region: Understanding the intra-regional differentiation in urban population development in the declining regions Saarland and Southern-Limburg. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). 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Geografiska Annaler B ABSTRACT – We increasingly understand the causes of urban population decline: these can be, among others, processes of deindustrialization, decreasing fertility, political instability or climatic disasters. However, we are still insufficiently able to explain why differences still exist between cities within regions experiencing the same macro- processes. This research addresses this intra-regional differentiation in population decline in the declining former mining region of Saarland (Germany). Quantitative and qualitative analysis revealed that the differentiation in current decline stemmed from 1) differentiated population development trajectories of the past, with a massive population boom followed by an aged and declining population in the industrial municipalities, and 2) the spatial distribution of amenities over the region, and 3) the spatial distribution and accessibility of housing opportunities steering migration flows. These housing opportunities are not necessarily concentrated in those areas that are attractive. Rather, the distribution of these opportunities strictly follows the planning logic of the supralocal institutional framework, with a concentration of housing along the main infrastructures and in larger centres. The case study thus reveals that the mechanisms behind this intraregional differentiation are much more complex than often portrayed in the urban development- and decline debate. 5.1 Introduction In several regions in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the United States and Japan, the population is decreasing, getting older and fertility rates are dropping. In Western European countries, the fertility rate already dropped below the replacement level in the early 1970s. However, this was still compensated for by immigration (Grant et al., 2004). The terms urban decline and urban shrinkage are – often interchangeably – used for these processes. Although commonly accepted definitions are still lacking, generally, urban decline is considered to be a transformation process comprising demographic and economic changes and often leading to other spatial and social 87 changes in the city (Bradbury et al., 1982; Pallagst et al., 2009). Economic change is often simultaneously seen as both an indicator of urban decline and a cause of population decline via out-migration. In order to circumvent this conceptual ambiguity, in this research the decision was taken to focus on the indicator population decline only, and to perceive economic decline as a (possible) cause rather than as an indicator. Often mentioned causes of changing natural developments are decreasing fertility rates due to changing family structures and living preferences, and ageing, while migration is often triggered by structural economic changes such as deindustrialization, political changes and wars or changing residential preferences like suburbanization (Wiechmann and Pallagst, 2012; Beauregard, 2009). The relationship between economic and demographic changes is a key point in urban shrinkage and decline debates (Lang, 2008). Although the general picture of underlying drivers is clear, difficulties arise when we explain why within a region in decline, the development of municipalities suffering from the same general processes still differs. These general processes are apparently not sufficient to explain those differences. It is exactly this question that will be addressed in this chapter: how can intra-regional differentiation in the level of urban population development in the declining region Saarland be explained? It is aimed to contribute to a more profound understanding of the theoretical concept of urban decline by extrapolating how the constituent parts of the concept (births, deaths, in-migration and out-migration) impact on each other and which factors, in their turn, fuel these constituent parts. A conceptual model was drafted on the basis of the literature relevant to explaining intra-regional differences in natural developments and migration. The explanatory power of this model was assessed on the basis of a quantitative and qualitative examination of the municipal developments within a declining former mining- and steel region in Germany: Saarland. 5.2 Theoretical framework In order to understand the intraregional differentiation in population development, we must subdivide population decline into its components (developments in the number of births, deaths, in-migrants and out-migrants), and investigate what causes the intraregional differentiation in these components in a declining region. Changes in fertility behaviour and ageing are said to be rooted in the second demographic transition (Lesthaeghe and van de Kaa, 1986; Billari, 2008). Decreasing fertility together with increasing life expectancy, lead to population ageing and eventually 88 population decline. Intraregional differences in births and deaths stem from differential population age compositions, which are the result of past and present migration patterns. In the decline and shrinkage debate, the focus is on out-migration and it is linked to structural economic changes flowing from changes in the global division of labour, such as deindustrialization with concomitant job losses (Rink et al., 2010), or the political shift like the post-socialist transformation (Wiechmann and Pallagst, 2012; Steinführer and Haase, 2007). Again, such general economic and political processes may explain why within a larger geographic area (e.g. Eastern Europe, large industrial regions) population decline occurs, but they cannot explain the differences in population development within the region. Intra-regional differences in migration can perhaps better be understood by treating urban population decline as another form of urban population change. One of the frequently used interpretations of growth and decline of urban areas is the idea of urban areas passing through a number of successive stages of growth and decline. The stages of urban development model of van den Berg et al. (1982) is an example of such models. Even though this model has been criticised for its mechanical and deterministic nature and lack of theoretical underpinnings (Rérat, 2012; Elliot, 1997; Capello and Faggian, 2002), as “forces driving net centralisation and decentralisation were more complex than the simple ones determining industrial decentralisation by itself, or cross-sectional patterns of residential segregation” (Cheshire, 1995, 1046), it can still be useful as a first attempt to describe these processes of growth and decline. This body of theory distinguishes different successive cycles of urban growth (urbanization, suburbanization, desurbanization and reurbanization), more specifically, the causes of the onset of a new stage in which a different part of the functional urban region starts growing often at the expense of the other parts, and the causes of the spatial differentiation of population development within this urban system in a particular stage (figure 5.1). 89 Figure 5.1. Stages of urban development of van der Berg et al., 1982 Source: Based on van den Berg et al., 1982 In these models, it is assumed that urban actors maximize their well-being by choosing those locations offering the most ‘welfare potentials’ (housing, employment and amenities). After Geyer (1996), I will call such welfare potentials productionist (employment-, education-, and income related) and environmentalist (living conditions related). Which of these motives dominate in migration decisions, codetermines which part of the urban system grows. What is perceived as a welfare potential can change due to fundamental economic, social, demographic and cultural developments – thus heralding a new stage (van den Berg et al., 1982). For instance, suburbanization is enabled through parallel wider societal opportunity-creating