Surrounding area
The terms surrounding area , suburb belt , agglomeration belt or colloquially bacon belt are understood to mean the suburban settlements in the vicinity of a city . As a rule, the term refers to politically independent municipalities outside the city limits of a core city . The city center and the surrounding area together form an organic whole, the urban region . The relationship between the city and the surrounding area, which has been changing in the industrialized countries for decades due to the process of suburbanization in favor of the surrounding area, is one of the most important areas of research and work in regional planning .
Economic and financial aspects
Significant social, economic and ecological problems arise from the fact that the surrounding communities are growing, especially due to the migration of relatively high-income households from the city to the surrounding area , and benefit from the wide range of infrastructure in the core city without contributing to its financing through taxes . A large part of the working population also works as a commuter in the core city, but pays wage and income taxes in the communities of residence. The term “bacon belt” ironically refers to this disproportion.
Aspects of urban development and spatial planning
Due to the urban sprawl in the surrounding area of large cities, the clear separation between town and country is becoming blurred; The city and the surrounding villages are growing together, green caesuras are being built on, thus also destroying cold zones and forest areas that are important for the city's microclimate .
The development of a suburban belt also contributes to the development of urban monocultures : The strict spatial separation of living and working areas simultaneously leads to the formation of satellite towns that appear deserted during the day, to the cultural drainage of the cities that people flee quickly after work, and for the development of permanent traffic congestion due to commuter flows between the surrounding area and the city center.
In order to plan to prevent such development tendencies, German city and metropolitan regions maintain regional associations and joint state planning . The principle of forming sectoral districts is also intended to counteract the disadvantages of the suburban belt.
Challenges of city-states and border regions
This fiscal problem is particularly acute for city-states , as they are politically separated from their surrounding communities not only by a city but also by a state border: while the formation of a suburban belt around Frankfurt am Main or Munich is disadvantageous for the cities themselves , the associated tax power losses are at least partially compensated for through the respective state budget and through the state-internal municipal financial equalization scheme . The tax power of the surrounding municipalities of the city-states, on the other hand, only benefits the neighboring countries and is only redistributed internally there.
A similar problem arises where the agglomeration is divided by national or international borders and the suburbs on the other side of the border are politically, planning and fiscally inaccessible for the core city. Due to the different political and legal systems, the formation of city-surrounding organizations is difficult to implement here. A good example is the city of Basel with its metropolitan area, which extends into the canton of Basel-Landschaft as well as Germany and France.
literature
- Dirk Bronger: Metropolises, megacities, global cities. The metropolitanization of the earth . Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2004, ISBN 3-534-16286-2 .
- Norbert Fischer : The modeled region. Stormarn and the Hamburg area from the Second World War to 1980. Wachholtz, Neumünster 2000, ISBN 3-529-07099-8 .
- Johann Hartl: The boundary between the built city and the open landscape. Contents of formal and informal plans using the example of municipalities in the Munich area . Dissertation, TU Berlin 2006 ( full text ).
