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The German City System

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Understanding German Real Estate Markets

Part of the book series: Management for Professionals ((MANAGPROF))

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Abstract

The German city system with its essential structures, founded in the Middle Ages and further developed during the industrialization, features characteristics that are unique within Europe. Consisting of a polycentric network of cities ranging from 200,000 to 600,000 inhabitants that is supplemented by a concentration of small and medium-sized towns (<20,000 inhabitants) mainly in the West and Southwest, the German city system is interspersed with evenly distributed large cities that contribute to a functional polycentricity within Germany due to their differing economical specialization. Based on the assumption that in future cities can be regarded as privileged fields of innovation for knowledge and cultural production, the large and in particular the metropolitan areas like Berlin, Hamburg and Munich can be expected to show a considerable prospective growth owing to their highly diversified knowledge-economical functions. Furthermore, their functional competiveness and their central position within Europe allow the German cities to be well prepared for the competition amongst European cities and regions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In excess of the employment rates of the land and housing sector being specified here, the values referring to the real estate sector being disclosed by Maennig (2016) within this anthology also cover the employees in the construction industry and in parts of the service segments, which can be assigned to the real estate economy.

  2. 2.

    The net rate of migration in this case is calculated as follows: Net rate of migration = (immigrants-emigrants)/employees at the place of work × 1000.

  3. 3.

    The NUTS-regions are based on the existing national administrative subdivisions. In countries where there are only one or two regional subdivisions or where the size of the existing subdivisions is too small, a second and/or third level is created.

  4. 4.

    “The agglomerations with values above the arithmetic mean (cut-off value) are designated by the word ‘hub’” (Growe 2010: 13).

  5. 5.

    Thus the future commission of the Bavarian federal state government recently presented a report, demanding a stabilization of the cities and a clearer break with the spatial planning goal of the equivalence of the living conditions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bergische University of Wuppertal, Wuppertal, Germany

    Guido Spars & Inès-Caroline Naismith

Authors
  1. Guido Spars
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  2. Inès-Caroline Naismith
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Correspondence to Guido Spars .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. International Real Estate Business School (IRE|BS), University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany

    Tobias Just

  2. University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    Wolfgang Maennig

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Spars, G., Naismith, IC. (2017). The German City System. In: Just, T., Maennig, W. (eds) Understanding German Real Estate Markets. Management for Professionals. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32031-1_5

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