Municipal statistics

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In addition to the federal and state statistics, municipal statistics are part of the overall system of official statistics . In Germany it is part of the information infrastructure of the democratic state. The large cities operate municipal statistics in the exercise of their right and in compliance with their duty to regulate the affairs of the local community on their own responsibility (Article 28.3 of the Basic Law). The cities thus provide themselves and their citizens with the numerically well-founded knowledge that they need for municipal planning and decisions. The municipalities are fundamentally responsible for all areas of the local community without a special legal mandate, as long as the state has not taken on tasks through laws. Accordingly, the range of tasks of municipal statistics basically covers all areas of life. In the German-speaking area, there are comparable municipal institutions in Austria and Switzerland.

development

When the first urban statistical offices were founded in Bremen and Charlottenburg in 1861/62, and later in the large cities, they were primarily intended to satisfy the need for information resulting from rapid urban growth and the necessary figures for the foundation of housing construction , supply and disposal and transport work out. These priorities have changed many times in the following decades and adapted to the special city-specific needs. They extend to all areas of urban research , even to the orderly urban demolition in some East German cities at the beginning of the 21st century and to the challenges of structural change , globalization and, more recently, the integration of people with a migration background .

Organization, statistical confidentiality

As with official statistics in general, city statistics were also outsourced from administrative enforcement right from the start and centralized in a municipal statistics office. Initially, there were mainly practical reasons for this: In this way, it was possible to bundle the required statistical expertise and methodologically better secure, harmonize and combine the data from the various administrative areas. In the 1970s the aspect of data protection and statistical confidentiality was added. Because during the prison administration, the actions of which are directed towards the individual concerned, the processing of personal data is only permitted for the legally prescribed specific purpose of their functional area, only those statistical offices which, according to the legal regulations, are "sealed off" from all enforcement tasks directed at the individual concerned “Are to save data from different sources for future questions in advance and evaluate them together. This authorization goes beyond the business statistics of the departments, which are based exclusively on their own data and its current status. In substance, maintaining statistical confidentiality was one of the principles of municipal statistics . However, today the cities no longer refer to the “unlawful area” of local self-government , but rather to the data protection provisions of the state statistics laws . The regulations are concretized by municipal statutes and business instructions, which also determine the position of the statistical office in the administration and the principles of its actions.

Data sources

As a data source, the automated administrative registers have recently come first. All city statistical offices use the population registers , mostly in the form of periodic file extracts and collection of the statistically relevant changes due to births, deaths, cases of migration, changes in marital status and nationality. In addition, there are evaluations of files from the social administration and the vehicle registration office as well as the labor administration. The previously predominant use of data from federal and state statistics has receded somewhat since the lack of a current census , but is becoming more important again with the transmission of microdata from official construction activity statistics, school statistics, youth welfare statistics and the business register. Many cities update their own statistical building files with apartment information. In addition to these quantitative data, qualitative data are becoming increasingly important: since the beginning of the 1970s, more and more city statistical offices have been conducting their own survey research, with which they determine objective facts through representative samples, and increasingly also the subjective opinions and wishes of the population, of local entrepreneurs, Employees and "customers" of the city administration and event visitors.

Instruments and methods

A central instrument of municipal statistics is their system of inner-city, so-called small-scale structure . The territorial division into statistical districts and city ​​districts , which was necessarily rigid at the time of manual processing, has generally given way to a flexible IT-supported classification system, the statistical spatial reference system , which extends from the individual address via the block side and the block to the district and an automated problem-related grouping of the territorial ones Structure elements and the data assigned to them are allowed. While the competence for the exact determination of coordinate points lies with the surveying authorities, in most cities the city statistical offices manage the spatial reference systems and thus enable the generation of the area-related specialist data in the field of statistics, and in many cases also in administrative execution, for example in elections, training, in social affairs and other communal tasks. They hold the boundary layouts for machine mapping and support the geographic analysis, e.g. B. of catchment and supply areas as well as location potentials. In the application of statistical methods, small-scale model and forecast calculations play an important role in addition to development observation through monitoring . They refer not only to the city as a whole and its surrounding area and its interdependencies, but above all to sub-areas of the city that can be flexibly delimited with the help of the spatial reference system.

Cooperative process development

Such computer-aided processes are developed by the city statistical offices in the communities of the KOSIS association, in which the interested cities agree on the desired range of services and jointly finance the implementation as well as maintenance and care. The procedures here are household generation from the data of the population register (HHSTAT), the small-scale flexible population and household forecast (SIKURS) and basic projects such as the statistical information system (DUVA), the administration of the spatial reference system with the statistical building file (AGK). In addition, to support the comparison of cities, there are the joint data collection projects (KOSTAT and Urban Audit), with which the cities involved are also involved in international cooperation via Eurostat .

Benefits and users

The ordered data collections as well as the updated building files and spatial reference systems of the city statistical offices enable a variety of problem-specific selections, combinations and consolidations by the users. The more visible products of the city statistical offices are their expertise and their regular publications in the form of monthly, quarterly and annual reports (yearbooks). The technical development increasingly facilitates cartographic representations and thus thematic maps to illustrate the urban structures, developments and interdependencies. More and more cities are making their statistical information available on the Internet, in some cases with user-defined tables, graphics and maps. The main users of the work results are the administrative management, the city councils and the planning departments of the administration, but also the private and semi-public actors working in the city, scientific institutions and the citizens themselves. In some cases, the statistical offices also act as data collection points for state and federal statistics for the census . The compilation and analysis of election results, petitions and decisions is one of the most effective tasks in many cities.

Exchange of experience and training

The heads of the newly created city statistical offices organized the necessary exchange of experience, the representation of interests vis-à-vis regional and national statistics as well as vis-à-vis the other departments of the administration as early as 1879 in the "conference" of the heads of these offices. In 1904 it was transferred to the Association of German City Statisticians (VDSt), which since then has been a registered association including almost all scientifically active employees of city statistics and is also the legal sponsor of the KOSIS association founded in 1981. The VDSt has been publishing the magazine "Stadtforschung und Statistik" since 1988 and in 1998 it adopted a guiding principle. This association has organized annual meetings since it was founded. The more scientifically oriented German Statistical Society and - since German reunification - the German Demographic Society also take part in these statistical weeks . The association has also been organizing the VDSt spring conferences since 1981 and the KOSIS conferences since 2005, which primarily serve to provide further training. The Bamberg seminars offered together with the German Association of Cities serve to further the training of clerks in the offices . The intermunicipal technical coordination with urban policy is carried out by the City Council working group “Urban Research, Statistics and Elections”, and until 2002 the Statistical Committee of the German City Council.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ralf Zeitler : The German municipal statistics. Stuttgart and Berlin 1938
  2. ^ Bernhard Mewes: Becoming and essence of urban statistical offices. In: City statistics in administration and science, Berlin 1950, p. 92 ff.
  3. ^ Association of German City Statisticians (ed.): City statistics in the course of time. Cologne 1975
  4. ^ Association of German City Statisticians (ed.): City statistics and city research, services, tasks, goals. 100 years of the Association of German City Statisticians 1879–1979. Hamburg 1979
  5. ↑ cf. including Trutzel: Strategic tasks of local statistics . In: Der Städtetag, 1997 no. 6, p. 396 ff.
  6. ^ Association of German City Statisticians (ed.): Municipal statistics between the protection of basic rights and the guarantee of self-administration. Nuremberg 1988, ISBN 3-922421-18-0
  7. ↑ cf. including Klaus Trutzel: Municipal statistical planning information with the help of data processing - shown in the PENTA project. In: Der Städtetag 1979, no. 12, p. 729 ff.
  8. ↑ Klaus Trutzel; Rudolf Schulmeyer: Room-related information management. In: Der Städtetag 1999, no. 1, p. 9 ff.
  9. ^ KOSIS - Municipal Statistical Information System
  10. ↑ cf. Association of German City Statisticians and KOSIS Association (ed.): Aims, activities, organization. Nuremberg 1994
  11. ↑ KOSIS network: http://www.staedtestatistik.de/kosis.html
  12. ↑ cf. z. B. City of Nuremberg, Office for Urban Research and Statistics (Ed.): Guide to the official statistics of the city of Nuremberg. Nuremberg 1989
  13. ↑ cf. Structural Atlas Augsburg. City of Augsburg [1]  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.statistik.augsburg.de  
  14. ↑ cf. Office for urban research and statistics (ed.): Nuremberg perspectives on the 100th birthday of the statistical office. Nuremberg 2000
  15. ^ Günther Bantzer: The function of statistics and urban research in modern local government. In: Der Städtetag 1979, no. 12, p. 725 ff.
  16. ↑ Horst Rinne: Hundred Years of General Statistical Archive. In: General Statistical Archive, Göttingen 1991

literature

  • Günther Bantzer: The function of statistics and urban research in modern local government. (Address by the President of the German Association of Cities on the occasion of the association's 100th anniversary on October 23, 1979 in Hanover), in: Der Städtetag 1979, no. 12, p. 725 ff.
  • Bernhard Mewes: Becoming and essence of urban statistical offices. In: City statistics in administration and science, Berlin 1950, p. 92 ff.
  • Horst Rinne: Hundred Years of General Statistical Archives. In: General Statistical Archive, Göttingen 1991
  • Klaus Trutzel: Municipal statistical planning information with the help of data processing - shown in the PENTA project. In: Der Städtetag 1979, no. 12, p. 729 ff.
  • Klaus Trutzel: Strategic tasks of municipal statistics . In: Der Städtetag, 1997, no. 6, p. 396 ff.
  • Klaus Trutzel; Rudolf Schulmeyer: Room-related information management. In: Der Städtetag 1999, no. 1, p. 9 ff.
  • Ralf Zeitler: The German municipal statistics. Stuttgart and Berlin 1938
  • City of Nuremberg, Office for Urban Research and Statistics (Ed.): Guide to the official statistics of the city of Nuremberg. Nuremberg 1989
  • City of Nuremberg, Office for Urban Research and Statistics (Ed.): Nürnberger Perspektiven on the 100th birthday of the Statistical Office. (Anniversary issue), Nuremberg 2000 ( online )
  • Association of German city statisticians (ed.): The city statistics in the course of time. Cologne 1975
  • Association of German City Statisticians (Ed.): City statistics and urban research, services, tasks, goals. 100 years of the Association of German City Statisticians 1879–1979. Hamburg 1979
  • Association of German City Statisticians (ed.): Numbers and decisions 1879–2004. (Festschrift for the 125th anniversary of the Association of German City Statisticians), in: Stadtforschung und Statistik 2/2004
  • Association of German City Statisticians (ed.): Municipal statistics between the protection of basic rights and the guarantee of self-administration. Nuremberg 1988, ISBN 3-922421-18-0
  • Association of German City Statisticians and KOSIS Association (ed.): Aims, activities, organization. Nuremberg 1994

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