Content and Objectives

The project focusses on the motives and socio-demographics of migrants as well as the effects of internal migration on regional population development. Migration to economically up-and-coming conurbations and migration from peripheral regions, where jobs have been lost due to structural change, are a challenge for public services. The project analyses the relocation patterns of different socio-economic groups (e.g. by age, gender, migration background and education) and their effects on regional disparities in population development, the social structure of the population and the labour market.

The project also looks at urban-rural migration in Germany and its effects on the spatial distribution of the population. The initial focus is on the question of whether internal migration continues to contribute to population losses in the largest cities and suburbanisation, as has already been observed in Germany for several years. Another important question is whether rural areas have also become more attractive as a place to live as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and the expansion of home office options. Population development in conurbations, suburban areas and sparsely populated regions is being investigated in cooperation with the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and the Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning as part of an IF-Bund project using small-scale (GIS) analyses. The new morphological delineation of settlement structures in Germany developed in the first phase of the project will be used in a second step to analyse small-scale population data (including the 2022 census) and geocoded survey data (e.g. SOEP, FREDA). The aim is to identify the trends and patterns of population development in urban and rural areas at a small-scale level.