Unit 5: The German urban system

(Arnim Koch, Wolfram Lange, Martin Meyer; revised by D. Wiktorin)

• The German urban system currently does not have a primate city. Part of the reason is a prevention of a monopoly of Berlin by the German separation.
• Cities [2] with population sizes of 200,000 to 600,000 are prevalent resulting in a slightly convex shape of the rank-size-distribution [3].
• Small and medium sized cities (< 20,000 inhabitants) are concentrated in the city rich West and Southwest. However, the spatial distribution of the big cities is quite even. Hamburg and Munich, the second and third biggest cities, are located in the North and the South and similarly the biggest and fourth biggest cities, Berlin and Cologne, do represent the East and the West.
• Regarding to their functions the big cities are strongly specialized.
• The urban agglomerations Rhine-Ruhr, Rhine-Main, and Rhine-Neckar are multi-centric in their structure, consisting of several core cities and their city regions intermingled with each other. These agglomerations build quite a contrast to the relatively city poor regions of the North, the North-east and the South-east as well as the entire central mountain region of Germany.

The basics of the German urban system were laid in the main period of city foundations in Central Europe which took place in the 12th and 13th centuries. It was already at this time, when a dense network of urban places was established, which did not change distinctly until the 19th century. Only industrialization enforced new impulses. Then the large urban regions on the Rhine, the Ruhr [4] and Saar [5] evolved based on resource-orientated industries. The growing manufacturing sector backed up differentiating the structure of the urban system and resulted in an intensification of inter-city linkages. A steady increase of the degree of urbanization occurred. Moreover, urbanization [6] had been over-proportionally strong since the foundation of the German Reich in 1871. The decision in favour of Berlin as capital of the German Reich resulted not only in an enormous population growth [7] of the city up to the 1920s but also in a concentration of functions of all kind. This tendency was even strengthened when the National Socialists took over power in 1933 so that the capital of the Reich became the all dominating primate city for a special period in time.

After WW II when Germany was divided into two states, the urban system underwent tremendous changes and for both the Germanies different specific urban systems began to evolve. Berlin became a divided city and at least West Berlin did not acquire a similar exceptional important position again in the urban hierarchy of West Germany. The mass emigration from the Eastern regions of the former German Reich as well as from the German Democratic Republic (or Soviet Zone of Occupation) to West Germany was another important source of change. Between 1945 and 1961, 10 million expellees and refugees sought a new home in the West (Blotevogel/Hommel 1980: 156). The destinations of this massive migration stream not only were the heavily bombed and destroyed big cities. In particular the medium and small sized cities and towns got a big share, too, because the living conditions were distinctly better there. When the Federal Republic of Germany was founded in 1949 decentralized patterns of the urban system - a traditional element in the German system - were further intensified by the federal structure of the new state. Each of the newly founded Bundeslaender (provinces) got a capital [8] with administrative and governmental functions. The federal government supported the efforts of the big German cities of achieving a functional specialization. Partly as compensation for making Bonn instead of Frankfurt the federal capital [9] the new founded Bundeszentralbank (Federal Central Bank) was located in Frankfurt and the city evolved into the financial centre [10] of West Germany. Hamburg was able to establish itself as the centre of print-media [11], Cologne became specialized as an insurance centre and later on as location for media and arts [12] and Munich became a centre of the film industry [13].

This distinct division of functions between the cities (resulting in a regional city system) was backed up by a changing educational policy, too. From the 1960s new universities [14], e.g. Konstanz, Siegen or - as the first university of the Ruhr Area - Bochum [15], were added to the traditional ones like Tübingen, Heidelberg or Marburg. In particular, Bochum is a good example for the efforts the federal and provincial governments fairly early made to initiate a process of change in the regions characterized by old industry and de-industrialization in order to convert the cities from industrial sites into centres of services. In general, the period of the 1960s and 1970s resulted in strong changes of the regional structure in West Germany. On the one side the southern regions with minor environmental problems but a strong innovative potential gained importance whereas the old industrialized regions and the peripheral (rural) ones lost population and economic power. The result is a pronounced South-North-differential. On the other side a strong intraregional population shift took place from the cities into their hinterlands - the so-called suburbanization. Bearing in mind these results the necessity of spatial planning incentives on the federal and provincial level became more and more apparent.

The federal government as well as the provincial ones reacted in several ways. On the federal level the spatial planning law (Raumordnungsgesetz [16]) was enacted in 1965. The main goal is ensuring an equal standard of living in all regions of the Federal Republic. A spatially equally distributed system of central places [17] should be created in order to avoid rural blight and an increasing concentration in urban agglomerations, which were burdened with problems already. A result of the programs of federal and provincial spatial planning was that different types of cities and urban agglomerations have evolved. Furthermore, agglomerations as well as peripheral regions - for example the German-German border region, the Emsland or the central mountain region - were financially supported by various means of promotion (in particular the so-called Gemeinschaftsaufgaben [18] - joint tasks of the federal and provincial government). The activities on the upper planning levels were supplemented by a comprehensive territorial reform on the municipal and district level. The reform can be interpreted as the answer to meet the challenge of an increasing economic connectivity within urban agglomerations. A reorganization of the traditional administrative boundaries seemed to be urgent with respect to the daily stream of commuters, the heavy financial deficit of the core cities compared to the suburban municipalities with their increasing tax yield and the high administrative costs caused by the multitude of smallest municipalities. The reorganization of the county and municipality boundaries was completed in 1978 not without the opposition of some particularly smaller towns [19] and rural communities. In North Rhine-Westphalia for instance the 2.300 independent municipalities in 1970 were amalgamated into only 396 communities in 1978. A similar comprehensive reform is in place in the Neue Bundeslaender (East Germany) since 1990.

The urban system [20] in the GDR shows patterns basically different to the ones of the West German system. The traditional partition into two differently structured regions - the city poor, rural North and the city rich, highly industrialized South - was even further supported by the spatial planning policy of the GDR. In contrast to the federal system of spatial planning [21] of the FRG, spatial planning of the GDR was part of the central planning scheme of a socialistic state. The small and medium sized cities, in particular the ones in the northern regions, suffered a steady population decline because construction activities almost only were concentrated in the industrialized urban centres. Also in contrast to West Germany, a strong suburbanization process around the big cities did not take place. But the former position of Berlin as primate city of the German Reich was kept for East Berlin due to the East German system. Administrative functions, for instance the function of a provincial capital (Bezirkshauptstadt), often were spatially allocated without any historical context. Since reunification not only the adjustment of regional disparities within East Germany is a main task of all-German spatial planning but the integration of both the urban systems into a single one is as important. Improvements in infrastructure are very basic in fulfilling this task. Even 10 years after reunification the situation of the electricity grids or the highway system, for instance, demonstrate that the partition has not overcome to a great extent. In particular a tremendous backlog demand exists in the field of transportation where the building of new rail routes [22] in East Berlin and the reopening and improving of former East-West connections are urgently necessary.

The decision to make Berlin the capital [23] and the future site of the German government has far-reaching consequences and probably influences the evolution of the urban system quite a lot. The final vote of the German parliament on June 20, 1991 in favour of a move of the government was very close (388 members of the parliament were in favour of Berlin, 320 in favour of Bonn) (Laux 1991: 543). Until recently this decision has remained undisputed. The opponents of the Berlin-solution not only fear the tremendous costs but also that the urban system in Germany could be changed dramatically because of a concentration of functions [24] in the "new old" capital. And the current developments in the new capital - for instance the ambitious construction project at the Potsdamer Platz and in the new Regierungsviertel (government district) - might be seen as an indication of an economic and cultural boom. But there is no good reason to expect a complete re-change of the existing division of functions within the German urban system with the consequence of Berlin becoming a primate city like Paris for France.

The hope of keeping a well-balanced, regional city type urban system in the future, too, is fostered on the one hand by the strength of the German cities and regions, each of which have strongly created their own distinct profiles in the last decades. On the other hand a further development of the national urban system will be superimposed by processes of the European and international scale anyway. Globalization and an evolving process of European integration will necessarily lead to changes in the all-European and as a result in the German urban system. Germany has become the core region of a Europe of regions [25]. And in particular with regard to the ongoing processes in the East European countries and the integration of these nations into the European Union the competition between the regions will increase. It will be necessary to combine the local potentials in a cooperative manner and - in doing this - strengthen the German urban system in order to meet the pressure of adaptation on the European and the global level successfully. This is the central feature of a new tendency in spatial planning on the European level, a conception which intends to tie the single city or community into so-called urban networks [26] or (national) border crossing planning regions. Bearing in mind the intensive functional connections, an expansion of and towards inter-regional and inter-community networks has been overdue for a long time anyhow. Only in going such a way will a well-balanced spatial development and a strengthening of the endogenous potential of the regions be ensured - both of which are unconditional prerequisites for creating an equal standard of living in all regions of Europe.

[1] http://lernarchiv.bildung.hessen.de/archiv/uentwurf/ekunde
[2] http://www.karlsruhe.de/Stadtentwicklung/afsta/Statistik/Index.htm
[3] http://www.mygeo.info/skripte/skript_bevoelkerung_siedlung/lanu2.htm
[4] http://www.route-industriekultur.de/geschi/index_e.htm
[5] http://www.saarland.de/einblicke_landesgeschichte_4827.htm
[6] http://www.g-o.de/index.php?cmd=focus_detail2&f_id=24&rang=9
[7] http://www.chronik-berlin.de/uk/index.html
[8] http://www.acu.edu/academics/cas/fl/german/bundeslaender/bundeslaender.htm
[9] http://www.bonn-virtuell.de/
[10] http://www.frankfurt.de/sis/English.html
[11] http://fhh.hamburg.de/stadt/Aktuell/behoerden/wirtschaft-arbeit/wir-fuer-sie/medien-telekommunikation-design/multimedia-neue-medien-it.html
[12] http://members.aol.com/stgymgt/koeln/medien.htm
[13] http://www.muenchen.de/Rathaus/gg_raw/branchen/medien/38697/index.html#fil
[14] http://www.holderied.de/DeutscheHochschulen.html
[15] http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/uni-profil/universitaet/
[16] http://www-public.tu-bs.de:8080/~schroete/baurecht.htm
[17] http://www.mygeo.info/skripte/skript_bevoelkerung_siedlung/lanu2.htm
[18] http://www.brandenburg.de/sixcms/detail.php?id=45310&_siteid=72
[19] http://www.oefre.unibe.ch/law/dfr/bv086090.html
[20] http://www.georgiasouthern.edu/~hkurz/geo/ddr-b1.htm
[21] http://www-public.tu-bs.de:8080/~schroete/baurecht.htm
[22] http://www.bahn.de/konzern/holding/bahnbaut/die_bahn_bauprojekte_historie.shtml
[23] http://www.bundestag.de/bau_kunst/berlin/debatte/index.html
[24] http://www.aicgs.org/publications/pubonline.shtml
[25] http://www.uni-mannheim.de/mateo/verlag/reports/otteu/otteuro.htm
[26] http://www.kern.de/geschaeftsberichte/1999_04.htm
[27] http://www.kern.de/geschaeftsberichte/1999_04.htm

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