Abstract
It is believed that social and spatial polarization has intensified in German cities due to globalization. We find this recognition in the discourse on the “Socially Integrative City Program,” which has been conducted as a common task of the Federal and Länder governments of Germany since 1999. There is, however, little empirical research on the degree to which polarization has intensified in the process of globalization. The purpose of this article is to examine this theme using the case of Dortmund. This city is in the Land of North Rhine-Westphalia, which tackled the problem of intraurban polarization earlier than the Federal government from the beginning of the 1990s. Dortmund is one of the cities that has worked hard to resolve the problem, and its policy was supported by the EU in the framework of the URBAN II program of during 2000 and 2006.
Although there are different views on the beginning of globalization, the author thinks that it has intensified since around 1990, because information and communication technology made significant advances around that time and has deeply influenced not only the economic but also the social and political spheres. In the case of Germany, we should take into account the unification of the Federal Republic and the Democratic Republic and the influx of migrants from all over the world, but especially from the former socialist countries, when we discuss the effects of the globalization on German society. Thus the present author compares the spatial segregation of foreign inhabitants before and after 1990.
To measure intraurban polarization, the spatial concentration of the poor and the unemployed can be compared only between around 2000 and 2004 because of limited data availability. These indicators including the spatial segregation of foreign inhabitants are considered as variables of social exclusion as a multidimensional phenomenon of intraurban polarization not only in German but also in European cities as a whole. The present author uses the Unterbezirk or subdistrict as the unit area for analysis. There are 170 subdistricts in Dortmund, which can be regarded as neighborhoods, although the former is larger than the latter.
As a result, all subdistricts in so-called Nordstadt and two inner-city subdistricts west of the city center are identified as problem districts. These districts are characterized by immigrants of various origins and represent social exclusion and intraurban polarization. There were traditional heavy industries, especially firms in the steel industry, and breweries in these districts. But almost all the traditional industries closed down from the 1970s through the 1990s. The terminal port of the Dortmund-Ems Canal is in northwest of Nordstadt. Because of the decline of the steel industry and breweries, the logistics companies around the port were hard hit.
The concentration of foreign inhabitants in those subdistricts was also observed before 1990, and the dissimilarity indices of foreign inhabitants have declined since at least 1987. There have been a complex of ups and downs of residential location quotients of each nationality, but most of them declined between 1987 and 1995. On the other hand, the concentration of persons depending on welfare benefits accelerated between 2000 and 2004 in most subdistricts of Nordstadt, although their proportion in the district's total population declined in the second half of the 1990s. The number of unemployed increased more rapidly in many subdistricts between 1999 and 2004. In regard to the segregation of foreign inhabitants, their absolute number increased in the 1990s. According to the estimation of the city authority of Dortmund, the proportion of people with migrant backgrounds reaches more than 60% in the eastern and middle parts of Nordstadt.
It should be noted that so-called guest workers do not always represent polarization. ...
