Immigration Strategies - Planning Policies for the Regeneration of Cities

• Applicant: Dr. Manfred Kühn
• Subject Area: Urbanism, Spatial Planning, Transportation and Infrastructure Planning, Landscape Planning
• Term: from 2017 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 388747481

This project examines cities in Germany that had been marked by the shrinkage of their population due to structural crises, but have reached a new phase of population growth. The growth of these cities is based on immigration. Without the influx of new residents the cities would shrink. Although local regeneration policies tend to be growth-oriented and do not accept shrinkage as a development paradigm, most cities fail to develop explicit immigration strategies. Nevertheless, many urban development plans articulate a need for the immigration of young and skilled labor. However, as the influx of refugees and asylum seekers continues to be seen as a problem, the tasks associated with this influx are delegated to the realm of integration policies. As a result, urban development and integration concepts fail to be linked. The project therefore asks which strategic planning approaches are developed to achieve the regeneration of cities through immigration and marks the new term migration-led regeneration in order to describe these policies. In six case studies of large and medium cities in East and West Germany the project examines the strategic approaches that have been developed, the possibilities for a stronger link between urban development and integration concepts that these approaches entail, on which models of governance they are based as well as the problems and obstacles that they pose in planning practice.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants