Kati Volgmann

Rural areas in Europe have been undergoing structural change for years, resulting in strong functional differentiation and fragmentation into prosperous and structurally weak areas. Rural areas are as diverse as the challenges they face. Not only various megatrends but also social, economic, technological, ecological, and political trends influence and shape the development of rural areas. In order to understand the problems and causes of the current development of rural areas, this paper provides a differentiated trend analysis for rural areas at the European level. A content analysis of more than 70 EU-funded project reports on rural areas and rural development is carried out. The aim is to identify trends and their drivers over the last decade and to summarize opportunities and challenges for successful rural regeneration. These external and overarching trends, particularly in the context of a sustainable transition, renewable energies, the emergence of new technologies and growing awareness of environmental impacts, offer rural areas more opportunities than ever before. The interplay between external incentives (e.g., European Union policies) and endogenous regional development (e.g., local actors) is crucial for the successful exploitation of these opportunities for rural regeneration.

In the last two decades, German major cities have shown an impressive comeback as places to live and work. Using the case of Germany’s 33 largest cities in terms of population and employment and their functional hinterland, this study identifies cities characterised by above-average growth processes (“boom”) and how this “boom” effects the cities’ hinterlands. A distinction of these “spillover effects” is made between “slop over effects” in the sense of suburbanisation into the closer hinterland and “enrichment effects” in the sense of regional urbanisation of the wider hinterland. The “spillover effects” are analysed using population and employment dynamics in the cores and the first and second ring of the hinterland. While population development continues to move into the hinterland, employment growth in the surrounding region is orientated towards existing centres and transportation axes. Theories of regional urbanisation developed in other geographical contexts, especially in North America, thus can only be transferred to a limited extent to the German urban context with its historically grown small-scale polycentric structure.

The paper investigates the peculiarities of polycentric urban regions (PURs) in generating agglomeration economies, namely, the question of how urbanisation externalities – size, density and diversity – take effect in German PURs and influence the growth of metropolitan functions from 1995 to 2017. The metropolitan growth of PURs is compared with that of urban regions showing a dominant core. We use our findings to address questions about the forces of urbanization externalities on a regional scale. Finally, we outline what we see as emergent research topics in the interplay between metropolization and the development of PURs.

As the epitome of the urban, the city type “metropolis” has been experiencing an ongoing boom for two to three decades. With a quantitative text analysis of the leading German national print media, the patterns of linguistic use for the term metropolis and for the two largest cities Berlin and Hamburg are highlighted. They are interpreted as attributions of meaning in mass media communication processes and generate a semantic field whose analysis allows declarations to be made about size, function and imagery of a metropolis over time.

This paper contributes to the discussion on borrowing size effects. According to this concept, smaller cities that are part of larger functional urban regions can utilise metropolitan functions and economic externalities, thereby boosting their regional performance. This is conceptualised in the four‐dimension scheme of Meijers and Burger. Consequently, this paper analytically explores and operationalises the borrowed size concept and reveals insights into the relation and spatial distribution of four types of effects: borrowed size, borrowed performance, borrowed function and agglomeration shadow. Research on these spatial effects is applied on a small‐scale spatial level and integrates all municipalities in German urban regions. We find different geographies of effects among the four‐dimensions of borrowed size. City size and centrality degree show a significant influence on positioning in the four borrowed size effect types.

This paper contributes to the discussion about the driving forces behind the polycentric restructuring of urban regions involving a centripetal process of metropolization and a centrifugal process leading to a regionalization of cities. Using the Frankfurt/Rhine-Main urban region in Germany as an example, it analyzes how these processes are manifested in the regional spatial structure. Two different empirical explorations are applied to reveal the spatial distribution and clustering of (1) knowledge-based industry (KBI) firms on a locational scale and (2) the sectoral specializations of and complementarities between the identified clusters. On the one hand, the identified traditional and new KBI clusters mirror the region’s traditional polycentric structure; on the other, the Frankfurt central business district stands out as the definite hotspot for KBI activities within the region. Thus, metropolization processes turn out to be the dominant driver of urban restructuring. Regarding the latter, the analysis shows that new KBI clusters frequently demonstrate strong monofunctional specialization and tend to complement and relieve traditional central business districts with regard to specific types of KBI activities, particularly in high-technology manufacturing and related high-technology knowledge-intensive services.