Katrin GrossmannFachhochschule Erfurt | FHE · Forschungskollektiv Peripherie und Zentrum - FPZ
Katrin Grossmann
Prof. for Urban and Regional Sociology at FH Erfurt
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Introduction
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April 2007 - September 2014
Publications
Publications (104)
The literature on shrinking cities often portrays local initiatives in two contrasting ways: either as marginal, powerless, and somewhat backwards-oriented actors, or as human capital, a resource for development, and even as the hope for a more democratic development. However, there is a risk that scholarship unintentionally contributes to local in...
The individual debates on housing poverty, energy poverty, and mobility poverty for the most part overlook the interwoven nature of all three cost burdens, especially for low-income households. This study examines how the three cost factors interact on a household level, the consequences for those affected by cost burdens, and how they cope and neg...
EU policy documents pursue a win-win outcome for climate policies and the combatting of energy poverty. Yet current policies do not achieve the full participation of the energy-poor in regard to energy transitions. Structural factors like welfare policy, housing- and energy-market mechanisms, and tenancy prevent the energy poor from benefitting fro...
Throughout the last decade, the goal of acknowledging and alleviating energy poverty has made its way to the core of energy policies across the world, including the high-standing SDG7 as a benchmark. While much debate is still devoted to conceptual and empirical clarifications, its measurement through indicators, or the appropriate policies aimed a...
Energy poverty is a far-reaching concept that intrinsically bridges numerous fields of study, ranging from engineering to anthropology and medical science to social psychology. The profound implications of energy poverty on the quality of life globally have also led to a wide range of metrics and policies aimed at measuring it and alleviating it, a...
Versión traducida al español del documento original: "A toolkit for a just transition with the people"
Background
Energy poverty has gained much traction over the last decades, holding both high multidisciplinary conceptual value, but also profound implications from a social policy perspective, being closely linked to the quality of life and well-being. The goal of our study is to evaluate recent measures aimed at tackling energy poverty in Europe b...
This author reply responds to commentaries on the implications of our article, ‘Dignity in Urban Geography: Starting a Conversation’ (2022). It elaborates on four points raised by the commentators: the problematization of the universality of this concept, the nexus of dignity and scale, the road to putting dignity into practice, and the differences...
Der Klimawandel stellt Gesellschaften weltweit vor gewaltige Herausforderungen. Im Begriff der Nachhaltigkeit scheint ein Konsens darüber, wie mit dieser Bedrohung umgegangen werden kann, kondensiert. Doch die vermeintliche Einmütigkeit kaschiert immer weniger Konflikte darüber, was genau unter Klimaschutz und nachhaltiger Lebensführung zu verstehe...
Der Klimawandel stellt Gesellschaften weltweit vor gewaltige Herausforderungen. Im Begriff der Nachhaltigkeit scheint ein Konsens darüber, wie mit dieser Bedrohung umgegangen werden kann, kondensiert. Doch die vermeintliche Einmütigkeit kaschiert immer weniger Konflikte darüber, was genau unter Klimaschutz und nachhaltiger Lebensführung zu verstehe...
Background
Energy poverty has gained much traction over the last decades, holding both high multidisciplinary conceptual value, but also profound implications from a social policy perspective, being closely linked to the quality of life and wellbeing. The goal of our study is to evaluate recent measures aimed at tackling energy poverty in Europe by...
Studies in critical urban geography actively deal with injustices and humiliation, employing concepts like equity, justice, sustainability and the like, but strikingly, dignity is not among such current normative concepts. Analytic perspectives and definitions of dignity are widely discussed by philosophy, legal studies, and race and indigenous stu...
The drivers of energy poverty are deeply structural-they span, at least, across our current economic, social, employment, energy, climate, taxation, welfare, housing and health policies. Energy poverty causes go far beyond the triad of "low income-poor energy efficiency-high expenditure", which is traditionally considered to set the context to addr...
Zusammenfassung
Aktuell werden Konflikte in der Migrationsdebatte neu bewertet. So wird ihr vermehrtes Auftreten als Zeichen für „gelingende Integration“ interpretiert. Konflikte sind hier als das Verbindungsband konzipiert, das offene, plurale Gesellschaften zusammenhalten kann. Zugetraut wird den Konflikten auch, dass sie einen Stimulus setzen fü...
Obwohl Wohnen als zentrales Merkmal und Ressource von Kleinstädten verstanden
wird, ist die kleinstadtbezogene Wohnforschung von erheblichen Lücken und Komple-
xitätsreduktionen geprägt: Der wissenschaftliche Begriffsapparat ist durch eine groß-
städtische Brille entstanden und bildet kleinstädtische Lebenswelten kaum ab. Zudem
folgt die Wohnfors...
While sustainability was introduced as a game-changing idea, it has often been criticized for its vagueness and its over-accommodating bent toward powerful, vested interests, economic growth, and profit seeking—or, on the contrary, for not being able to enter mainstream politics. As a result, in the current political climate, sustainability policie...
online available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/04353684.2021.1953280
In many regions with long-term structural economic and demographic problems, small towns are shrinking as their urban centres, they are losing population, jobs, vibrancy and infrastructure. Yet, knowledge about their trajectories remains vague as studies on urban shrinkage have so far focused on large cities. When monitoring population change of sm...
This article examines the role of social conflicts in the context of migration and discusses the relation between such conflicts and institutional change. We understand conflicts as tensions that evoke contradiction between different social groups or institutional actors. Varied urban contexts together with dynamic immigration of heterogeneous popu...
Trust is a fundamental ingredient of prosperous democracies. In Europe, trust in existing elected democratic institutions is fading while authoritarian nationalist movements grow. Experiences of neglect, ignorance, and inferiority are one explanation for this. This paper explores the link between the experiences of households in a state of energy p...
Since the concept of energy poverty first emerged, studies have combined normative orientations, analytical approaches and policy review to engage with energy deprivation as a problematic feature of contemporary societies. Over the past decade, this scholarship has aimed to conceptualize the normative grounds for critique, empirical work and policy...
Der Artikel beschreibt die Bindung von 40 Klein- und Kleinstunternehmen an ihre Standorte in zwei Leipziger Quartieren. Ausgehend von einer Darstellung der wissenschaftlichen Debatte zu Theorien lokaler Ökonomie und ihren Bezügen zur Quartiersforschung wird präsentiert, wie lokale Unternehmer/innen sich an ihr Quartier binden, welche Unterschiede e...
Die Energieeffizienz von Wohngebäuden gilt als Win-win-Strategie für Klimaschutz und den Kampf gegen Energiearmut. Doch ist dieser Optimismus wirklich gerechtfertigt? Der Beitrag stellt infrage, dass einkommensarme Haushalte kurz- oder langfristig tatsächlich von energetischer Sanierung profitieren. Dazu werden die Effekte von energetischer Sanieru...
Energy poverty alleviation requires a rethinking of our economic and social system (Bouzarovski 2018a). Energy poverty has traditionally been studied around the income-housing-energy price triangle (Thomson 2013), but new research avenues need to be opened to deepen our knowledge of energy poverty. To understand the multi-layered nature of energy p...
Urban studies in Germany are traditionally oriented towards large cities. The structures, meanings and functions of small towns are not sufficiently perceived and differentiated in scientific or political debates. Adequate research on small towns requires systematic, comparative, inter- and transdisciplinary approaches. Traditional attributions sho...
Open Access: https://shop.arl-net.de/media/direct/pdf/pospapier/pospapier_113.pdf
Stadtforschung ist in Deutschland traditionell großstadtorientiert. Kleinstädte werden weder in wissenschaftlichen noch in politischen Auseinandersetzungen in ihren Strukturen, Bedeutungen und Funktionen hinreichend wahrgenommen und differenziert betrachtet. Eine ad...
Energy retrofitting is commonly seen as a measure to both decrease energy use for heating and to alleviate energy poverty. However, little attention is paid to the repercussions of retrofitting in urban space and segregation dynamics. This paper brings the concepts and heuristics of residential segregation research together with examples of the pra...
Zusammenfassung
Soziale Differenzierung ist in den Großstädten Ostdeutschlands zu einem wesentlichen Charakteristikum urbaner Entwicklung, Alltagswahrnehmung und Politik geworden. Insbesondere lässt sich dies in den Städten beobachten, welche nach der Schrumpfung der 1990er-Jahre seit Kurzem wieder dynamisch wachsen. Die Vertiefung sozialer Ungleic...
Der Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit der Wechselwirkung zwischen lokaler Ökonomie, dem Quartier bzw. seinem räumlich-zeitlichen Wandel und seiner Spezifik. Anhand zweier Fallstudien aus Leipzig soll dargestellt werden, unter welchen Bedingungen lokale Unternehmen wirtschaften, welche Rolle das Quartier als Bezugsund Kundeneinzugsraum einnimmt, welche F...
Energy efficiency in the housing stock has been praised as a win-win strategy reducing end energy use for heating and alleviating energy poverty. However, policies to foster energy efficiency improvements have led to rising protests and conflicts because investments made into retrofitting became a means of speculation and displacement of low-income...
This chapter analyses which categories are mobilised by residents to describe the social groups in their area and which normative assessments are attached to those descriptions. This intersectionality approach allows one to see social stratification at work in how inhabitants of diverse neighbourhoods in Leipzig, Paris, and Athens perceive, describ...
Introduction
Living with social differences and all the encounters, conflicts and transgressions this entails is a constituent part of urban living (see, for example, Amin, 2002; Massey, 2005). With increasing regional and global migration, the level and complexity of social differences seems to have reached a new height, as has been highlighted by...
How do people deal with diversity in deprived and mixed urban neighbourhoods? This book provides a comparative international perspective on superdiversity in cities, with explicit attention given to social inequality and social exclusion on a neighbourhood level. Although public discourses on urban diversity are often negative, this book focuses on...
Purpose
Energy poverty can be seen as a relatively new, but typical sustainability problem in which various dimensions (ecology, society and economy) are interlinked and in part conflict with each other. Moreover, the variety of involved stakeholders (planners, tenants, housing companies, private landlords, energy consultants, etc.) represents conf...
This article analyses how policies to foster social cohesion within diverse and unequal urban contexts are affected by New Public Management and austerity policies. Based on the analysis of a handful of governance arrangements in three cities that differ in their institutional structure and diversity policy approaches (Copenhagen, Leipzig and Milan...
Residential choice behaviour is a complex process underpinned by both housing market restrictions and individual preferences, which are partly conscious and partly tacit knowledge. Due to several limitations, common survey methods cannot sufficiently tap into such tacit knowledge. Thus, this paper introduces an advanced knowledge elicitation proces...
Nach 1990 erlebten ostdeutsche Großwohnsiedlungen die Abwanderung großer Teile der Bevölkerung und Stigmatisierung von außen. Seit der Jahrtausendwende jedoch begann für viele größere ostdeutsche Städte eine Phase der Stabilisierung und Zunahme der Bevölkerungszahlen. Durch diesen Zuwachs verändert sich die Bevölkerungszusammensetzung in den Großwo...
Hitzebelastung ist in der aktuellen deutschen wie auch internationalen Debatte zur Anpassung der Städte an den Klimawandel eines der Top-Themen. Zusammen mit Starkregen, Hochwasser oder Stürmen werden sommerliche Hitzewellen als die Klimafolgen benannt, auf die sich Städte vorbereiten müssen. Aus sozialwissenschaftlicher Sicht sind einerseits die U...
This chapter reports on an international debate on urban shrinkage by bringing together several national strands of research across the West. It conceptualizes “urban shrinkage” as a specific trajectory of cities, with population loss being its main indicator. Firstly, the chapter deals with bridging the core national debates, before aligning these...
Interest in urban shrinkage has steadily grown among scholars worldwide and Germany has received great attention in shrinkage-related research. Little has been written, however, about how the discussion of urban shrinkage has shaped policy responses and vice versa. This paper seeks to fill this gap with respect to the German experience by examining...
Energiearmut wird in der internationalen und auch in der beginnenden deutschen Debatte recht quantitativ konzipiert. In Großbritannien, einem Land das auf eine lange Beschäft igung mit dem Thema zurückblickt, ringt man seit der Veröffentlichung des Hills-Reports um den treffenden Ansatz der Operationalisierung und Messung für Energiearmut. Zur Deba...
In many European countries, rising energy prices and depleting resources decrease the affordability of electric and heat energy for poor households (e.g. Scarpellini et al. 2015; Kolokotsa and Santamouris 2014)). The topic has been taken up in parts of the political arena in Europe following the UK’s example (Bouzarovski et al. 2012),especially in...
Energiekosten sind in europäischen Städten ungleich verteilt. Schaut man auf die Debatten in verschiedenen europäischen Ländern, wird klar, dass zumeist einkommensschwächere Haushalte besonders hohe Energiekostenbelastungen haben. Ursache dafür ist, dass diese sich oft mals nur die Wohnbestände mit dem schlechtesten energetischen Standard leisten k...
In the final decades of the twentieth century, the post‐industrial regions of western Europe and the US were hot‐spots of urban shrinkage, and this also affected large areas in post‐socialist countries. Despite ongoing calls for a better integration of diverse global urban experiences into theorization, post‐socialist cities and their trajectories,...
Die Energiewende und mit ihr die steigenden Strompreise haben das Thema
Energiearmut für eine kurze Zeit ins Rampenlicht gerückt, die Diskussion um
Energiekosten und soziale Ungleichheit auf die Tagesordnung gebracht und in
Forschung und Praxis eine Reihe von Pilotprojekten angestoßen. Dabei zeigt sich, dass
eine solche Debatte mehr Facetten ha...
Thermal renovation (retrofit) of residential buildings is one of the major issues in the transition to a low-carbon energy system. This paper argues that the specific conditions in shrinking middle-size cities create an especially difficult environment for energy renovations. Using empirical data from the shrinking City of Delitzsch, Germany, it is...
Agent-based models (ABMs) have tended to become more complicated in recent years, going along with challenges of fully understanding model behaviour. While partly answered using simple and abstract models, the question of the role of different aspects of model detail for controlling model outcomes still has not been explored with empirical ABMs. We...
For decades, public and scholarly debates on large, post-war housing estates in western Europe have been concerned with social decline. After 1989/1990, the point in time of fundamental societal change in eastern Europe, this concern was transferred to estates in post-socialist cities. However, empirical evidence for a general negative trend has no...
Neighborhood research today is largely concerned with two central aspects of neighborhood development: gentrification and decline. This paper sets out to enrich the discourse on neighborhood change, especially that concerned with so-called declining neighborhoods, by drawing on assemblage and complexity theories. These approaches emphasize processe...
In this article, we contribute to a better understanding of contextual differences related to residential segregation. We illuminate one specific contextual factor—housing oversupply—and how it intersects with historically inherited patterns of socio-spatial differentiation and other drivers of residential segregation. The study is based on an anal...
Die energetische Sanierung von Wohnhäusern wird in vielen Städten vorangetrieben. Was im Hinblick auf Energieeffizienz sinnvoll ist, kann aufgrund steigender Mietkosten zu einer Verdrängung der alteingesessenen Bewohner(innen) führen. Damit energetische Sanierung nicht dazu beiträgt, soziale Ungleichheiten auf Stadt- und Quartiersebene zu erhöhen,...
Social cohesion always appears more frequently as a policy goal of the European strategy that promotes the integration of spatial, economic, and social dimensions of growth. This comprehensive approach also has to deal with the social consequences of demographic change, tackle urban poverty, and guarantee access to amenities in isolated neighbourho...
Großmann, K., Buchholz, J., Buchmann, C., Hedtke, C., Höhnke, C., Schwarz, N.: Energy costs, residential mobility, and segregation in a shrinking city. 39, 14 – 24.
This article discusses the question of how urban shrinkage gets onto the agenda of public-policy agencies. It is based on a comparison of the agenda-setting histories of four European cities, Liverpool (UK), Leipzig (Germany), Genoa (Italy) and Bytom (Poland), which have all experienced severe population losses but show very different histories wit...
The paper reports on a collaboration of sociologists and landscape ecologists in understandingfuture residential patterns in a medium sized shrinking city in Germany. Shrinking cities are an especially interesting case here, because numbers of inner city relocations are in general higher than in other cities (Sturm et al. 2013 for Germany). This is...
Socio-spatial segregation – the question of the uneven distribution of social groups in urban space – is a classic of urban research literature. The extensive body of literature was elaborated set against the background of growing cities all pointing to the growing spatial separation of social groups in todays cities. Less is known about the dynami...
![Figure 1. [In colour online.] Urban shrinkage: a heuristic model...](profile/Katrin-Grossmann/publication/271254189/figure/fig1/AS:349257220542464@1460280818347/In-colour-online-Urban-shrinkage-a-heuristic-model-source-modified-from-Haase-et_Q320.jpg)
Since the second half of the 20th century, urban shrinkage has become a common pathway of transformation for many large cities across the globe. Although the appearance of shrinkage is fairly universal-typically manifested in dwindling population, emerging vacant spaces, and the underuse of existing urban infrastructure, ranging from schools and pa...
In debates related to energy poverty, the link to questions of residential segregation remains somewhat peripheral. Because, usually, only energy-poor households are at the focus and residential mobility is not addressed, the interdependencies between households’ energy costs and the residential segregation of cities remain out of sight. Concern th...
We propose a framework for simulating the individual-specific exposure as an indicator for the environmental quality of urban regions. Adopting the perspective of a moving individual we combined maps of urban temperature with algorithms simulating human mobility. The former were derived from thermal-scan data gathered with an aeroplane and calibrat...
Sozialräumliche Segregation – die Frage nach der ungleichen Verteilung sozialer Gruppen im Stadtraum – ist ein klassisches Thema der Stadtsoziologie. Die umfangreiche Literatur dazu entstand vor dem Hintergrund wachsender Städte: von der Einwandererstadt Chicago, vor deren Hintergrund die sozialökologische Chicago School entstand, bis hin zu den im...
Recently, an international debate on urban shrinkage has brought together national strands of research on those cities that have experienced considerable population loss over a prolonged period. Partially as the result of language constraints and varied terminology used, these national debates have occurred rather separately and the huge potential...
In this paper, we use data from a longitudinal study to draw a realistic picture of the housing conditions and future potential of large housing estates with a focus on demographic change. In doing so, we plead for a broader look at demographic dynamics: going beyond ageing and population loss to encompass changes of household size and compositions...
Large housing estates are an important part of the built environment worldwide. They provide residence for millions of people. Within Europe, the debate surrounding such estates is largely concerned with social decline. During the last two decades, many large estates in Germany have experienced striking changes related to a declining and ageing pop...
The issue of urban shrinkage has become the new ‘normal’ across Europe: a large number of urban areas find themselves amongst the cities losing population. According to recent studies, almost 42 per cent of all large European cities are currently shrinking. In eastern Europe, shrinking cities have formed the overwhelming majority – here, three out...
An integrated and transdisciplinary model of residential decision making in a shrinking city.
Climate projections for Leipzig suggest elevated minimum and maximum temperatures as well as more frequent days with high temperatures. Hence, climate change is threatening human well-being and health. People spend the majority of their time indoors. Therefore, indoor temperatures (especially during the night) are of special importance with respect...
Increasing heat stress is one of the impacts of global warming cities have to cope with and adapt to. The recent German and international debate focuses on the threat of increasing mortality rates, especially the vulnerability of the elderly people and measures to reduce it. Further, possibilities of adaptation to climate change by means of urban d...
For decades inner cities in East Central Europe have been characterised by physical dilapidation, ageing in place and selective outmigration. Post-socialist transition added to these developments by further outmigration due to suburbanisation but also provided new opportunities of residential change. In Polish and Czech second-order cities there is...
Shrinking population numbers are a challenge for planning future investments into urban built structures: Declining population numbers can lead to decreasing real estate prices and can even induce vacancies, thus creating uncertainty for returns of investments into the housing stock and public infrastructure. This process is even more critical for...
Urban heat islands (UHIs) describe the phenomenon of altered temperatures that occur in urban areas when compared to their rural surroundings. UHIs influence human well-being, human health and the city as an ecological niche. UHIs can be quantified with meteorological ground measurements of air temperatures or with remotely sensed land surface temp...
Whereas many cities in Europe experience a continuous process of urban growth, a considerable number of others have experienced long periods of urban shrinkage over recent decades. In many such cities this process is ongoing. However, in between these two poles of growth or shrinkage, there are cities with less pronounced trajectories. One such typ...
Increasing heat stress is one of the impacts of global warming cities have to cope with and adapt to. The recent German and international debate focuses on the threat of increasing mortality rates, especially the vulnerability of the elderly people and measures to reduce it. Further, possibilities of adaptation to climate change by means of urban d...
In Deutschland werden Großwohnsiedlungen als Brennpunktgebiete gehandelt, wenn es um die Auswirkungen des demografischen Wandels
auf Quartiere geht. Insbesondere in Ostdeutschland überlagern sich Dimensionen des demografischen Wandels, wie Alterung, niedrige
Geburtenraten und Migration, vor allem in Form von Abwanderung. Bei einem Überangebot an Wo...
Going beyond the assumption that East Central European cities are still 'in transition' this book draws on the postsocialism paradigm to ask new questions about the impact of demographic change on residential developments in this region. Focussing on four second-order cities in this region, it examines Gdansk and Lódz in Poland and Brno and Ostrava...
The evolving debate on "urban shrinkage" mirrors an increasing interest in demographic phenomena on the part of urban scholars. This paper discusses ambiguous evidence about recent population decline in the large cities of Poland and the Czech Republic, with a particular focus on Łódz and Brno in general and their inner cities more specifically. By...
This article intended as a position paper reflecting on concept- -building discusses the question of how far the term and concept of urban shrinkage apply to postsocialist cities in East Central Europe. In addressing this issue, it touches on the more general topic of the benefits and limitations of the transferability of scientific terms and conce...
Questions
Questions (2)
I am aware of the contributions e.g. of Cecelski, Clancy and Skutch or Pachauri and Rao for developing countries. Are there any such works for the European context? Also ints to texts which adress gender among other issues are welcome.
I am looking for literature on the role of energy-related characteristics of buildings in residential preferences or residential mobility/ location decisions. Most of interest would be texts/ studies concerning energy costs or energy standards of buildings as a push- or pull-factor in location decisions. Related literature (sustainability and residential pref./ mobility also welcome).
