Deagglomeration (regional economics)
The term deagglomeration ( English de-agglomeration ), also de-agglomeration , is used in regional economics and urbanism to describe the dissolution of urban or industrial agglomerations , i.e. the shrinking of an agglomeration and, in particular, its core through migration, de-industrialization, lack of investment, etc. The urban substance becomes the urban substance a core city affected by this process, it is also called de-urbanization ( de-urbanization ). An example of this is the development of the city of Detroit over the last few decades and especially since 2009.
Deagglomeration does not only mean decentralization or regional dispersion of the settlement structure or of industrial settlements (so-called deglomeration ), as it is e.g. B. through suburbanization , the emergence of fat belts around agglomerations or through urban sprawl , but a reversal of an agglomeration process through "gutting" or a disintegration of the agglomeration into sub-centers. In practice, however, both terms are often used for the same phenomena.
Today, agglomerations are viewed as being in an unstable equilibrium between agglomeration and deagglomeration tendencies. From about the 1960s to the 1980s, the tendency towards deagglomeration predominated because the diverse location advantages (density of contacts, short distances, etc.) of the agglomerations threatened to be lost. Today this trend is reversed in many countries.
causes
Deagglomeration occurs when the centrifugal forces and stimuli acting on an agglomeration outweigh the centripetal growth and migration impulses. The causes of deagglomeration are overagglomeration (extreme densification, which leads to scarcity or depletion of resources and environmental problems in metropolitan areas), industry crises with population emigration (such as the crisis in the auto industry in Detroit ), increasing commuting times for commuters due to inadequate transport infrastructure, but also the stronger attraction of neighboring competing agglomerations.
Last but not least, technological development and networking, with their changing consequences, from the railways favoring centralization to the motor vehicle that tends to promote deagglomeration to the Internet, had a decisive influence on the course of both processes. The different pace of the development of labor productivity between urban and rural areas also has an influence. This is growing in the process of catching up industrialization in the emerging countries in different places at different speeds and can thus influence short-term relocations of companies and migration of workers. In Germany, the low interest rate policy since 2009 has resulted in building land in the cities becoming more and more expensive and at the same time lowering the cost of building your own home in the countryside, which led to the further expansion of settlement areas on the edges of the metropolitan areas, while the need for apartments in the Cities could not be covered by new buildings.
Simon Curtis from the University of East Anglia cites the fear of the collapse of the neoliberal “social factory city” due to its growing instability and vulnerability to crime, terror, traffic chaos and infrastructure collapse as another, but not entirely new, cause of the deagglomeration of metropolitan areas and business centers . This development is expressed in the tendency towards the decentralization of company headquarters, in social segregation and the creation of gated communities outside the centers. Last but not least, the construction of entire industrial “cities” outside of the old centers as in China or the construction of amusement “cities” testify to the endeavor to replace the city with a simulacrum , as Curtis discovered after Fredric Jameson . However, like Saskia Sassen , Curtis sees opportunities in this development, which may lead to “network cities”.
literature
- Yves Zenou: Agglomeration economies in American and European cities. Research Papers in Economics, 2 (1999), online: [1]
Individual evidence
- ↑ See e.g. B. Lexicon of Geography (2001) on www.spektrum.de
- ^ B. Arellano, J. Roca: Towards a New Methodology to evaluate the Urban Structure of the Metropolitan Systems. Chicago and Barcelona Metropolitan Areas as Examples , http://www-sre.wu.ac.at/ersa/ersaconfs/ersa11/e110830aFinal01779.pdf , p. 3
- ↑ Mauro Borges Lemos et al. a .: Capacitação Tecnológica e Catching Up: o caso das regiões metropolitanas emergentes brasileiras , Revista de Economia Política, vol. 26, nº 1 (101), pp. 95–118, using the example of the large Brazilian agglomerations.
- ^ Simon Curtis: Global Cities and Global Order. Oxford University Press, 2016.