Are Social Class Differentials in Place of Residence Increasing? Evidence on Socio-Spatial Polarisation in Germany.

Dirk Konietzka, TU Braunschweig
Yevgeniy Martynovych , TU Braunschweig

In the new millennium, population trends in Germany have followed divergent pathways in urban and rural areas (Statista 2023). Rural communities and small towns have faced a decline in population size as well as population ageing (Nobis et al. 2019). At the same time, the largest German cities have grown considerably (Statistisches Bundesamt 1997, 2023). As argued by authors such as Florida (2004), Goodhart (2017) and Reckwitz (2021), these spatial demographic trends are accompanied by rising socio-spatial polarisation, i.e., growing differences in the social structures between metropolises and rural communities / small towns. Rising urban-rural disparities are considered to be an outcome of disparate economic developments in post-industrial societies in which high-income jobs are mostly created in metropolises and regional technology hubs, while peripheral and former industrial regions are supposed to suffer from economic decline and worsening labour market conditions (Antonelli and Tubiana 2020; Crouch 2019). In this paper, we elaborate on this perspective by investigating educational and occupational class differentials in residential locations and their changes over a time period of more than 20 years in Germany. Our analyses are based on German micro-census data provided by the Research Data Centres of the German federal and state statistical offices. Preliminary results only partially support the assumption that spatial disparities between socio-economic groups have increased in Germany. Rather, age-specific analyses point at increasing differences in the probability of residing in the metropolises between the younger and the older age groups, which are partly independent of socio-economic status.

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 Presented in Session 114. Internal Migration, Spatial Inequalities and Segregation