The Relation of Diverging Urban Growth Processes and Demographic Change along an Urban-Rural Gradient

Demographic change is a phenomenon that first appeared in developed, industrialised societies in Europe. It is characterised by a decreasing, ageing, and increasingly individualised population. Apart from its widely discussed consequences for social systems at the national level, demographic change has spatially differentiated impacts on residential, traffic, and technical infrastructure as well as on resource and land consumption. In order to handle these impacts adequately and timely, the acquisition of knowledge of the spatial distribution of demographic developments is of major importance. Although studies on rather broad scales do exist in Germany, comparable results on a small-scale level that describe particular urbanrural developments are still rare. We aim at bridging that gap by presenting a method that allows for a small-scale comparison of urbanrural demographic, housing, and urban area dynamics in four different case studies that include growing and shrinking urban regions in Germany. By calculating and comparing urban-rural gradients in two points in time (1995 and 2005), we identify the differences and the similarities in the selected features of demographic change against two diverging urban trajectories. The results show that not only the shrinking urban regions but also the growing urban regions are impacted by demographic change. The spatial and temporal dynamics along the gradient curve, however, develop non-linearly and more heterogeneously in the two shrinking cities, indicating that small-scale changes are of major importance here. One similarity of all the four city regions is the increase of urban area regardless of population growth or decline. Copyright (c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.