The ‘production’ of
urban sprawl in eastern Germany
as a phenomenon of
post-socialist transformation
Henning Nuissl
*
, Dieter Rink
UFZ Centre for Environmental Research Leipzig-Halle, Department of Urban and Environmental
Sociology, Permoserstr. 15, D-04318 Leipzig, Germany
Available online 5 March 2005
The paper examines the causes, features and consequences of the vigorous dynamics of urban
sprawl seen in recent years in eastern Germany. Firstly, regarding the theory of urban devel-
opment, it demonstrates that this case of sprawl displays certain peculiarities—and so cannot
be sufficiently understood by drawing on ‘western’ experience. Secondly, concerning the
management of urban development, it is particularly striking that urban sprawl in eastern
Germany has largely proved to be the product of specific legislative and political conditions.
Changes in these conditions ought thus to significantly affect urban development. To help
contain urban sprawl in the context under scrutiny, however, these changes need to be geared
to the situation of urban stagnation and decline.
Ó 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Urban sprawl, eastern Germany, post-socialist transformation
Introduction
In western countries, urban sprawl has long been at
the top of the agenda of urbanists, geographers and
environmental scientists. In the former socialist
countries of central and eastern Europe, however,
urban sprawl was not a matter for discussion until
the 1990s. There, cities and towns used to expand
on their fringes, too, but this was mainly due to ur-
ban growth rather than centrifugal migration (either
of people or commercial facilities) or consistent
deconcentration (cf.
; see
also the case studies in
). Whilst,
ironically, ‘(. . .) liberal capitalism, with its accep-
tance of big cities and growth as the inevitable
accompaniment of success, is seeing its cities disinte-
grate under pluralized individualistic choices, (. . .)
Marxist societies, committed to the emergence of a
new settlement pattern for mankind, are preserving
cities and centrality in a traditional sense’ (
Following the breakdown of the ‘Socialist world’,
the paradigm of catching up on a modernisation
backlog predominated academic and political de-
bate on the course of post-socialist transformation.
Accordingly, most experts expected urban (i.e. spa-
tial) development in the post-socialist countries of
central and eastern Europe to follow the paths pre-
viously carved out in the ‘Western world’, which
admittedly are fairly heterogenous, as is for instance
apparent from the emergence of different types of
‘edge cities’ (
) in the US and western
Europe (see
). Hence, a
severe form of urban sprawl was predicted (see
), and did in fact begin almost
immediately—albeit solely in eastern Germany, the
only part of the former ‘Socialist world’ which was
‘lucky’ enough to be incorporated into an estab-
lished ‘western’ country. Urban development in
*Corresponding author. Tel.: +49-341-235-2696; fax: +49-341-235-
2825; e-mail:
Cities, Vol. 22, No. 2, p. 123–134, 2005
Ó 2005 Elsevier Ltd.
All rights reserved.
Printed in Great Britain
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doi:10.1016/j.cities.2005.01.002
123
the other central European transformation countries
has been more concerned with the issues of urban
regeneration, the privatisation of the housing stock,
economic crisis and deindustrialisation, increasing
socio-spatial polarisation, poverty and crime (e.g.
We˛cławowicz, 1993; Szelenyi, 1996
). And even in
those countries where the socialist regime was more
liberal and which, unlike the GDR, experienced
moderate trends of suburbanisation in the 1970s
and 1980s—for example Hungary, Yugoslavia and
Poland—urban sprawl hardly existed in the 1990s
and is only now beginning to (re)appear, mainly on
the fringes of the economically most advanced
(capital) cities, such as Budapest (
),
Ljubljana (
) and Warsaw
). East German cities,
towns and villages, on the other hand, displayed an
astonishingly expansionist character as soon as
post-socialist transformation had taken off. As a re-
sult, it was within the space of not more than 10
years that eastern Germany’s suburbia developed
its current appearance, which has very little in com-
mon with the former distinct separation of urban
areas from their surroundings (e.g.
). Moreover, eastern Germany is a particularly
interesting case of urban sprawl because sprawl
there has been linked with other phenomena of an
extremely comprehensive transformation process,
such as massive demographic shrinking and eco-
nomic restructuring on a scale unprecedented in
terms of speed, depth and breadth. This background
begs the question of what recent east German expe-
rience can contribute to the two major strands of the
general debate on the problem of urban sprawl.
(a) Urban researchers usually seek to understand
and explain the phenomenon of urban sprawl as part
of the general development of towns and cities on a
national or even global scale. In this vein, the issue
of urban sprawl is discussed with reference to the
broader (postmodern) discourse on the dissolution
of the difference between the urban and (what used
to be) the rural realm, in times of globalisation (e.g.
Sudjic, 1992; Touraine, 1996; Sieverts, 2003
), i.e. the
disappearance of the ‘European city’ (
in a ‘global mega city’ leading to the emergence of
a ‘post-city era’ (
). However,
whether urban development results from a set of
universal laws of the societal production of space re-
mains unclear (and the great variety of theories
underlying the explanatory efforts in urban research
support these doubts). Against this background, one
crucial question of recent urban research has been
the extent to which findings on sprawl derived from
‘western’ examples also hold for the formerly ‘east-
ern hemisphere’, too, i.e. whether trajectories of spa-
tial developments in the context of post-socialist
transformation are specific (cf.
). As a kind of frontrunner
in post-socialist transformation, the east German
case ought to provide a clue to this question.
(b) Academics and professionals in the field of ur-
ban and regional planning and design discuss the
societal, economic and in particular ecological im-
pacts of the ongoing spatial expansion of towns
and cities. Since most of these effects must be as-
sessed negatively from a ‘sustainability point of
view’ (e.g.
Johnson, 2001; Camagni et al., 2002
),
the debate is focused on how urban sprawl can be
contained effectively (e.g.
). Here
again, eastern Germany seems to provide a promis-
ing field of investigation since both urban sprawl and
regional planning and policymaking started almost
from scratch there in 1990. Moreover, the east Ger-
man case is highly interesting for two other reasons.
First, governmental policy with its ‘start-up pro-
gramme steered by money and law’ (
) displayed a high level of state intervention
and should thus provide an indication of the maxi-
mum capacity of steering spatial development. Sec-
ond, in eastern Germany, urban sprawl is taking
place in a context of demographic and (partly also
economic) shrinking. Although the connection be-
tween urban sprawl and urban shrinkage is of course
not exclusive to eastern Germany, it was particularly
pronounced there. Consequently, the experience
gained there with the management of urban sprawl
is instructive as to how urban sprawl can be con-
tained in a context of decline—an issue that will be-
come increasingly relevant in other parts of Europe.
The conditions, patterns and outcomes of urban
sprawl in eastern Germany are analysed below. The
second section sketches the general conditions of ur-
ban development. The third section then turns to
what has actually happened on the fringes of towns
and cities by addressing as an example the city of
Leipzig and its surroundings—a region that has been
at the vanguard of recent processes of urban sprawl.
Second and third sections jointly provide the empir-
ical material on the basis of which the fourth section
resumes the discussion of the east German ‘contribu-
tion’ to the general debate on urban sprawl.
Societal and economic conditions for urban
sprawl in eastern Germany after 1990
Eastern Germany’s societal and economic transfor-
mation—including huge financial transfers, the
substitution of players and the ‘import’ of adminis-
trative
structures
and
institutions
from
‘the
West’—created very specific social, economic and
political conditions for urban and especially subur-
ban development.
Demographic decline
The population of eastern Germany has been
decreasing rapidly since 1989. In 1989 and 1990
alone, about a million people moved from the
former GDR (German Democratic Republic) to
western Germany, since when they have been
The ‘production’ of urban sprawl in eastern Germany as a phenomenon of post-socialist transformation: Henning Nuissl and Dieter Rink
124
followed by roughly another million. In addition,
after 1989, births in eastern Germany immediately
plummeted and only recently has the birth rate
slowly recovered to its former–still low–level (cf.
). By contrast, migration to eastern
Germany has been too small a factor to make up
for this drain. The combination of these trends
should be expected to discourage urban sprawl.
However, this effect has partly been neutralised by
a sharp tendency towards smaller households. The
percentage of single-person households in eastern
Germany rose from about 25% of all households
in 1989 to more than 34% in 2001, whilst the average
household size dropped from 2.7 to 2.1 persons (cf.
Statistisches Amt DDR, 1990, p. 314
;
). Consequently, the number
of households in eastern Germany has actually in-
creased by more than 5% since 1990.
Economic restructuring and labour market problems
The lack of demographic growth in eastern Ger-
many has been accompanied by a lack of economic
growth. Hence another ‘classic’ driving force behind
suburbanisation and urban sprawl is absent (cf.
). The sudden opening of the east German mar-
ket, its simultaneous split from the east European
trading bloc Comecon, and the subsequent devalua-
tion of the largely antiquated industrial sector
prompted massive deindustrialisation throughout
eastern Germany. Between 1989 and 1995, some
70–90% of industrial jobs vanished. Consequently,
vast industrial areas became urban brownfields wait-
ing for reuse and these competed with the new sub-
urban enterprise zones for investors, who, however,
mostly erected their offices and factories on green-
field sites requiring no refurbishment or decon-
tamination.
Industrial decline was accompanied by the signifi-
cant contraction of the labour market. In fact the to-
tal number of people in work in eastern Germany
dropped by almost a third from about 8.6 million
in 1989 to about 6.1 million in 2001 (cf.
). Consequently, the rate of unemploy-
ment in eastern Germany has risen dramatically to
the present level (March 2004) of nearly 20%—a fig-
ure which can probably be supplemented by another
10–20% of people capable of (and generally inter-
ested in) gainful employment who are either
employed on the ‘secondary labour market’ or ex-
cluded from unemployment figures owing to their
attendance at training courses or because they gave
up looking for work some time after losing their pre-
vious employment, which is often true of women.
On the other hand, incomes in eastern Germany
have increased enormously, rising in particular in
the first few years after German unification,
although on average they are still about 15% lower
than in western Germany (cf.
). More-
over, this rise in incomes was part of a general trans-
formation of monetary value and prices and thus
only led to a considerable increase in the average
purchasing power of east German households in
the early 1990s (e.g.
). Besides, prior
to 1990 households in eastern Germany were unable
to accumulate wealth and so do not by any means
have the same financial resources at their disposal
as their ‘western’ counterparts. Hence, it can be con-
cluded that the economic potential for residential
sprawl on the ‘demand side’ is still somewhat limited
in eastern Germany.
Restitution
The legal institutionalisation of restitution—i.e. the
principle that returning expropriated owners their
former property take priority over financial compen-
sation—has been highly important for urban devel-
opment in eastern Germany (cf.
).
There are many inner city districts where as many
as 90% of properties have been subject to restitution
claims. All these claims had to be decided legally. In
the city centres in particular, the process of restitu-
tion often proved rather complicated. This impeded
the development of characteristic inner city facilities
and the reconstruction of dilapidated housing be-
cause there was little point in investing in property
until its ownership had been clarified (cf.
). Moreover, restitution petitions fre-
quently entailed a lengthy process involving the
(intermediate) trading of restitution claims and sub-
sequently of ‘restituted’ property, ending up in the
total rearrangement of property structures (cf.
1
Planning
One peculiar effect of the immediate, complete post-
socialist transformation in eastern Germany was the
‘vacuum’ regarding the power of public authorities to
steer spatial developments, which was characteristic
of the first half of the 1990s (cf.
). Since
legal requirements had totally changed, there was a
lack of ‘hard’ instruments of spatial planning, i.e.
enforceable development plans. At the same time,
much of the planning bureaucracy was fairly inexpe-
rienced as to both the new legal framework and the
manner of ‘western’ investors and their way of bar-
gaining. This gave private investors ample scope to
get their own way and to build on those plots (often
1
One instrument designed to mitigate the impeding effects of
restitution is the Investitionsvorranggesetz or Investment Priority
Act. In a nutshell, this law enables public authorities and investors
to give a specific project preference over pending restitution
claims for the promise of future compensation, provided all the
other legal and financial prerequisites for the project concerned
have been met. However, the ‘positive’ effects of the Investi-
tionsvorranggesetz were by and large restricted to investments by
big companies on vast greenfield areas, whereas investments by
mainly smaller investors inside urban areas hardly benefited from
it. Thus, this law actually increased sprawl.
The ‘production’ of urban sprawl in eastern Germany as a phenomenon of post-socialist transformation: Henning Nuissl and Dieter Rink
125
in ecologically sensitive areas) which they had in-
tended to develop right from the start (cf.
). Then again, it is doubtful whether planning,
in particular regional planning, would have endeav-
oured to withstand the pressure of investors and
developers even if it had been armed with proper
instruments. After all, in eastern Germany almost
all sorts of private investment were and still are all
too welcome, while politicians and public authorities
were by and large committed to the idea that sprawl
was not only inevitable but indeed a desirable sign of
progress.
Political programmes and tax policies
There are many policy fields, and not only in Ger-
many, where urban sprawl has traditionally been
supported. (West) German national housing policy
had always granted financial support for new own-
er-occupied property. Local and regional business
development policy usually harbours powerful
incentives
for
urban
sprawl,
too.
In
eastern
Germany, the most effective incentives to sprawl,
however, came from the programmes and fiscal
instruments implemented by the federal government
in order to stimulate the influx of capital. By award-
ing high subsidies without distinguishing between
different locations, these programmes and instru-
ments attracted several enterprises and companies
to suburbia where building development was easiest.
In addition, the role of Sonder-AfA, a special tax
write-off regulation designed to overcome the per-
ceived shortage of housing in eastern Germany
and to support the establishment of a new ownership
structure, was particularly important. Sonder-AfA
allowed 50% of the sum invested into new housing
on the territory of the former GDR to be written
off for tax purposes, twice the amount granted for
existing building stock (cf.
). Hence,
much rent-seeking money was steered towards the
creation of new residential areas, with more than
70% of the capital involved coming from western
Germany. Sonder-AfA remained in force in full until
the end of 1996, after which for another year the le-
vel of tax write-off for new buildings was 25%.
Desire for new housing
In the GDR, living as a family in a detached subur-
ban house was an aspiration that found little public
and no governmental enthusiasm. Even though little
is known about where people would have liked to
live ‘in their heart of hearts’, it is fairly certain that
for the great majority there was no point in aspiring
to a suburban life. Moreover, a kind of ‘socialist
model’ of housing had become reality, which oscil-
lated between the two poles of reasonably conve-
nient ‘mod cons flats’ in the typical huge prefab
housing estates—where more than a third of the
population was housed at the end of the 1980s and
which many people found desirable—and the omni-
present weekend allotment huts which, although al-
ready typical for Germany, became even more
prominent (not to mention sophisticated) under
the Soviet influence in the ‘East’ (‘dacha culture’),
and which provided the means to live amidst green-
ery in much of the owners’ spare time. Several stud-
ies on the future of the big housing estates have
demonstrated that in the mid-1990s, this ‘housing
culture’ was still thriving with people (in contrast
to the expectations of many researchers in the
‘West’) being mostly content with their housing situ-
ation and with no desire to move (e.g.
2
In this situation, however, the idea of becom-
ing a ‘suburbanite’ seemed to spread rapidly. The in-
crease in incomes and wealth might have been one
‘natural’ reason for this; another ‘artificial’ one was
probably the massive promotion of housing property
by government (cf.
) as well as the
media and advertising. Several studies on the
motives and choices of ‘suburbanites’ in eastern
Germany have shown that the main incentive for
private households to ‘sprawl’ was the opportunity
to considerably improve their housing standards
(e.g.
Herfert, 1996; Heydenreich, 2000
), which in
the early 1990s were much worse than in western
Germany in terms of the available living space and
fittings. Concerning the more solvent ‘suburbanites’,
the chance to acquire property was also important
(cf.
Harth et al., 1998; Mu¨ller et al., 1997
). By con-
trast, many typical pull factors of suburbia, such as
a green environment and the possibility to escape
from former neighbours, were (at most) of minor
importance (cf.
) and many
‘suburbanites’ would have preferred to remain in
the inner city if their living requirements could have
been met there.
Recent dynamics of suburbanisation and urban
sprawl
Given the conditions for spatial development in east-
ern German outlined above, urban sprawl by no
means appears to have been inevitable. In short, it
seems that social and especially economic conditions
were at best only partly conducive to urban sprawl,
whilst public policy proved highly supportive of it.
These antagonistic conditions triggered a kind of dis-
2
It was only recently that the long-expected decline of the ‘new’
housing estates built in East Germany in the 1970s and 1980s (the
image of which has increasingly approached the negative impres-
sion they made on ‘western’ architects and planners right from the
start) began. Nowadays they are the principle targets of efforts to
‘straighten up’ the east German housing market (with its vast
oversupply due to both the decline in population and the highly
subsidised ‘post-socialist’ building boom far exceeding demand)
by the demolition of buildings—although this is just as much
attributable to the fact that these are areas where buildings can be
demolished comparatively easy because of the homogenous
structure of the (public) proprietors as it is to their general lack
of attractiveness (
The ‘production’ of urban sprawl in eastern Germany as a phenomenon of post-socialist transformation: Henning Nuissl and Dieter Rink
126
continuous dynamics of urban sprawl. Hence, even
within the short period of just one decade, we can
identify different phases of urban sprawl which acted
conjointly to shape today’s suburbia. This is de-
scribed below by taking the city of Leipzig as an
example. Leipzig is a typical, albeit very pronounced
case of east German urban sprawl. One of the most
expanding German cities in the 1990s, nowadays its
sprawl has almost ceased. Moreover, it has become
a trendsetter in the current debate on urban shrink-
age and restructuring, which has attracted much
attention among domestic planners, urbanists and
academics (e.g.
Lu¨tke-Daldrup and Doehler-Behz-
Leipzig and its surroundings
Leipzig is located almost 200 km south of the Ger-
man capital Berlin in an old industrialised region
and has been an important city ever since medieval
times. In the early 1930s, its population reached its
historical peak of more than 700,000. In the GDR,
the country’s biggest city outside the divided capital
was characterised by a deteriorating housing stock
and it became a ‘notorious’ example of the decay
of residential areas and the outdated nature of urban
infrastructure. In 1989, almost 80% of the city’s
257,000 dwellings urgently needed refurbishment in
order to be preserved—a factor that contributed to
the public unrest that eventually brought the com-
munist regime to its knees. (In summer 1989, the
depressing condition of their city was a major reason
for the people of Leipzig to participate in growing
numbers in weekly demonstrations, thus giving rise
to a demonstration movement that later spread to
other East German cities and ultimately toppled
the regime.) Moreover, Leipzig was the GDR’s only
city with a decreasing population, and by 1989 had
only a little more than half a million inhabitants.
This decline was a result of the GDR’s policies of ur-
ban and economic planning and development, which
were mainly orientated towards the industrialisation
of formerly rural zones, rather than the modernisa-
tion of old industrialised regions. Nonetheless, the
socialist variant of suburban development described
above emerged between 1970 and 1990, when huge
housing estates were built and the number of week-
end allotment huts rose. The former were tanta-
mount to a population shift within the urban
territory towards its boundaries. At the same time,
however, they emphasised the border between the
city and the surroundings, between which a clear dif-
ference in settlement densities persisted.
Leipzig was hit hard by the economic transforma-
tion of the early 1990s, which inflicted severe struc-
tural changes on the city and led to a tremendous
loss of industrial jobs, the number of which plum-
meted from more than 100,000 in 1989 to less then
10,000 nowadays. Note that on the other hand Leip-
zig, as a major urban centre, was privileged from the
onset of the transformation process because it was
one of the targets of public attention and also public
money for model investments, such as the new Leip-
zig Fair exhibition centre (cf.
).
Nonetheless, unemployment in Leipzig is not much
lower than the east German average and thus many
inhabitants left the region in search of new or better
jobs. In fact Leipzig lost almost a fifth of its inhabit-
ants within the space of less than ten years.
3
Although approximately half of this loss was ac-
counted for by migration to the economically more
prosperous western Germany, the other half was
due to Leipzigers moving to suburbia. Thus the pop-
ulation of Leipzig had declined to about 420,000 by
1998, before the city almost doubled its territory by
incorporating several suburban towns and villages
(thus ‘recapturing’ many of those who had left for
suburbia) and increasing its population again to al-
most half a million (see
1990–1992: The ‘Wild East’ and the beginning of
sprawl
As soon as the inner German border opened, thou-
sands of investors flocked to the still existing GDR
and endeavoured to gain a foothold on the emerging
market. As far as the real estate, retail and housing
sectors were concerned, their interest was mainly fo-
cused on the fringes of major urban centres. After
all, nowhere else could they expect not only suffi-
cient demand for their goods and products but also
find enough affordable land ripe for immediate
development. This influx of ‘foreign’ capital affected
in particular Leipzig’s suburbia since it was part of
the biggest agglomeration, and thus part of the most
promising regional market in eastern Germany. The
first suburban investments to arrive were shopping
malls (cf.
), soon to be followed by the
costly but subsidised preparation of countless enter-
prise zones in almost every municipality, which, in
the most fortunate cases, were accompanied by the
erection of a few industrial plants. The development
of residential areas generally started a little later
(
). However, by the end of the first
sprawl phase (and with only a short time-lag), new
residential areas began to spread among the com-
mercial sites and retail outlets that had already ap-
peared, leading to a simultaneity of decay in the
inner city and ‘progress’ in the surrounding areas
(cf.
) (see
3
Note that in the course of industrial urbanisation around 100
years ago, Leipzig (like many other cities) experienced annual
growth rates which outpaced even the astonishing speed of the
recent population loss. Also, it is striking that despite their recent
gains in inhabitants, the population of the surroundings of Leipzig
is still smaller than in 1971, even though it is now much more
dispersed! Hence, in population terms urban sprawl hasn’t yet
entirely made up for the loss of population in rural areas so
characteristic of spatial development in the GDR.
The ‘production’ of urban sprawl in eastern Germany as a phenomenon of post-socialist transformation: Henning Nuissl and Dieter Rink
127
1992–1996: The rise of residential suburbanisation
From 1992 onwards Leipzig experienced a period of
severe, exponentially increasing residential subur-
banisation, which had reached its peak by the end
of 1996 (cf.
). This can largely
be attributed to two push factors that diminished the
quality of life in the inner city during that period.
Large parts of the old housing stock remained in a
bad condition (particularly due to the problem of
restitution). As a result, there was still a lack of
acceptable housing in the inner city and hence a con-
siderable difference in rents for decent dwellings be-
tween the city and the outskirts. In particular, rents
for the few refurbished homes were fairly high (cf.
). In addition, although rapidly
improving, the environmental quality was still low,
especially in inner Leipzig (cf.
). The severe residential sprawl of the first half
of the 1990s, however, was only possible because
real estate companies and investment funds pro-
vided a growing supply of housing on the urban
fringe, making suburbia a place where people could
afford to instantly improve their standard of living.
Thus it was mainly anonymous investors who not
only organised but also financed and physically
accomplished residential sprawl before the ‘subur-
banites’ moved into the finished dwellings—a phe-
nomenon which bears some resemblance to the
‘classic’, ‘Fordist’ type of sprawl in the US, with its
powerful real estate capitalists (cf. e.g.
).
In Leipzig, however, the suburban dwellings are
mostly still possessed by the investors, making home
ownership a much rarer phenomenon than is usually
the case in suburbia. Besides, the medium-sized (2-
to 4-storey) apartment block became a typical subur-
ban building. However, several ‘residential parks’
characterised by this type of architecture were af-
flicted by a high rate of vacant housing from the out-
set (
). All in all, an
exogenous type of urban sprawl can be noticed,
which is rather different from the idea that the main
driving force of urban sprawl is ‘suburbanites’ auton-
omously fulfilling their desire to live in detached
housing in a non-urban environment. This peculiar-
ity is also reflected in the ‘atypically’ balanced demo-
graphic structure of ‘suburbanites’ (cf.
). Suburbia gained inhabitants from the urban
Figure 1
‘Saale Park’, located around 20 km west of the city centre of Leipzig on the territory of a little village of less than
1000 inhabitants, used to be Germany’s biggest out of town retail cluster in the 1990s (and is currently converted into a real
shopping mall) (Photo: City of Leipzig).
Table 1
Population density in the Leipzig region (1990 and 2001)
Area (km
2
)
Density (Pop./km
2
)
1990
2001
Municipalities adjacent to Leipzig (‘Suburbia’)
744
188
217
Municipalities incorporated into the City of Leipzig since 1990
(excluding Podelwitz Su¨d and Radefeld) (‘Leipzig’s new fringe’)
145
319
476
Leipzig (1990 limits) (‘Inner Leipzig’)
147
3579
2954
Data: Federal State of Saxony; City of Leipzig; own calculations.
The ‘production’ of urban sprawl in eastern Germany as a phenomenon of post-socialist transformation: Henning Nuissl and Dieter Rink
128
core in all demographic groups—including people
who would not normally be thought of as ‘typical
suburbanites’, such as people living alone and the el-
derly. Indeed, this was the case throughout eastern
Germany (see
1997–2000: The resurgence of the core city
Although at first glance the tide of inhabitants leav-
ing the city for suburbia was not stemmed in 1997,
for the first time since 1989 the stream of residential
suburbanisation no longer increased. Rather than
occurring by chance, this development reflects the
completion of the first round of transformational
dynamics. Most importantly, temporary fiscal instru-
ments and programmes, which had proved tremen-
dously conducive to urban sprawl, ran out in the
second half of the 1990s. In addition, municipal
administrations and regional planning authorities
managed to catch up on their planning backlog.
Hence, the regulations imposed by planning author-
ities in order to contain the use of land for urban
purposes became increasingly effective. Further-
more, the ongoing resolution of restitution claims
enabled the effective renewal of inner city districts,
which as of the mid-1990s greatly improved the in-
ner-city environment as a whole and increased the
supply of refurbished inner-city dwellings. The suc-
cessful (re-)establishment of a couple of shopping
malls and one big department store (with another
one currently under construction) in Leipzig’s city
centre contributed further to this resurgence of the
inner city. Hence, the inner city became both a
cheaper and a more attractive place to live and find-
ing a good home there was no longer more difficult
or expensive than in suburbia (cf.
). Consequently, the housing markets in the
central and the peripheral parts of the urban region
levelled out (cf.
). At the same
time, the character of residential development in
suburbia began to change. The detached single-fam-
ily house became predominant, as a slowly growing
number of comparatively well off households had
managed to accumulate the financial resources nec-
essary to acquire property in the preceding years.
The new millennium: consolidation or perforation?
Since around the turn of the millennium, the flow to
suburbia appears to have come to a halt. Migration
between Leipzig and its hinterland is more or less
balanced and, except for a few major investments
(in particular in a large car manufacturing plant),
there are not many more peripheral development
projects on their way. Moreover, whereas the popu-
lation figures of the inner city districts have been sta-
bilising—which is enough to lend Leipzig the
character of an ‘island of stability’ in a still ‘anaemic’
east German context (cf.
)—we can
currently observe the population of some parts of
suburbia actually declining. This is taking place
against the background of a highly relaxed real es-
tate and housing market. Correspondingly, a kind
of reversion of earlier dynamics in urban develop-
ment can be made out, although we cannot yet ob-
serve a significant trend of people who had moved
to suburbia returning to the inner city. In particular
the demand for housing by younger people has made
some districts of inner Leipzig the region’s most
sought-after residential areas. By contrast, the de-
mand for suburban housing has dropped consider-
ably, leading to growing differences between the
more and the less attractive segments of the subur-
ban housing market. In addition, many suburban of-
fice blocks planned and built in the expectant times
of the 1990s are still vacant, and the situation is now
Figure 2
Massive apartment blocks (here in Neu-Paunsdorf) displaying a rather ‘urban architecture’ were typical of the
suburban development around Leipzig in the 1990s (Photo: UFZ).
The ‘production’ of urban sprawl in eastern Germany as a phenomenon of post-socialist transformation: Henning Nuissl and Dieter Rink
129
so acute that some of them are shortly to be demol-
ished. Besides, some analysts have even observed
the onset of ‘de-malling’ (
since sales in the peripheral shopping centres are
stagnating or decreasing. This threatens the very
existence of some of these centres, whereas others
seem able to keep up with their new inner-city com-
petitors by further investments (cf.
).
The abatement of urban sprawl in and around Leip-
zig is by no means tantamount to generally balanced
urban and regional development. Instead, these
days, the some 60,000 empty dwellings in Leipzig,
accounting for 19% of the city’s housing stock, rep-
resent an enormous challenge for urban policy-mak-
ing and planning (cf.
). Although some
20,000 of them are uninhabitable, on the other hand
around 30,000 unoccupied dwellings (including al-
most a quarter of the refurbished old housing) are
available to let on the housing market (
;
). This over-
supply makes investments to redevelop urban
brownfields or to refurbish the decaying buildings
that remain hardly economical. It has thus supported
the onset of a process of ‘perforation’ in the urban
fabric (cf.
): whilst the city
centre and the districts north, west and south of it
have become reasonably consolidated (although
they still contain pockets of decay), other parts of
the city are having to struggle with an increasing
number of unoccupied dwellings and declining infra-
structure. In some older parts of the city, there are
even blocks consisting almost entirely of vacant
houses, many of which are liable to collapse. Even
in the suburban realm, it has become increasingly
obvious that some of the new buildings erected are
in danger of decline (cf.
). To sum up,
if there had not been so many developmental activ-
ities in suburbia creating a huge surplus of buildings
and building land, the problem of urban perforation
nowadays would be much less serious. The decade of
heavy urban sprawl, which Leipzig and all the other
towns and cities in eastern Germany have recently
experienced, is hence closely linked to the coming
tasks of urban restructuring (see
Discussion
The features of urban sprawl in eastern Germany
sketched out above should be detailed enough to
discuss whether—and if so, how—this case of sprawl
can shed light on the two strands of debate intro-
duced at the start.
The ‘catching up with the West’ debate
The very existence of urban sprawl in eastern Ger-
many seemingly provides evidence for a process of
‘delayed modernisation’. However, given the pecu-
liar conditions and specific features of urban devel-
opment and sprawl in eastern Germany, the
assumption that the structure of ‘eastern’ cities
would converge with ‘western’ patterns, known from
either the US or western Europe, has proved un-
founded. Instead, a closer look at what has been
going on in and around eastern Germany’s towns
and cities lends weight to the more sceptical contri-
butions to research on urban and regional develop-
ment under post-socialism (e.g.
).
(a) In eastern Germany, typical features of urban
sprawl have been somewhat distorted.
First, given the population decline, residential
suburbanisation has been synonymous with a mainly
intra-regional redistribution—from the urban cores
to suburbia—of a decreasing number of people. This
severely augmented the effects of de-concentration
inherent to urban sprawl, by definition.
Second, the demography of ‘suburbanites’ has also
proved to be specific in that there is little difference
from the ‘urbanites’. Moreover, the rate of owner-
occupation is quite low in eastern Germany’s subur-
bia. These figures reflect the fact that differences in
the housing markets of the city and suburbia are
small, on both the demand and the supply side.
Figure 3
Abandoned houses in inner Leipzig (left). The demolition of such houses often results in a ‘perforation’ of the
urban fabric (right) (Photos: A. Haase).
The ‘production’ of urban sprawl in eastern Germany as a phenomenon of post-socialist transformation: Henning Nuissl and Dieter Rink
130
Third, especially around the big cities, the mor-
phology of suburbia is different from that known
from western Germany. For instance, a high share
of apartment blocks is found, residential areas with
detached houses are built comparatively densely,
and enterprise zones seem to be scattered around
the cities with little or no regard to environmental
planning concerns.
Fourth, notwithstanding the intensity of recent ur-
ban sprawl, the degree of de-concentration of urban
regions is still lower than in western Germany,
where the spatial expansion of towns and cities has
been underway for many decades. Urban sprawl,
although impressive in places, has by and large re-
mained a concentric development of limited range.
4
Finally, the speed of urban sprawl during the
1990s was almost unparalleled. Moreover, the se-
quence of different dynamics of urban sprawl re-
garded as normal was inverted, since commercial
development preceded residential. Urban research
has emphasised this reversal of ‘suburbanisation
phases’ in eastern Germany (
) as well as other post-socialist countries (
). However, seen from today’s perspec-
tive, urban development and sprawl in eastern
Germany after 1990 appears from the start to have
been a juxtaposition of different dynamics in differ-
ent functional sectors that were nevertheless largely
independent of one another (cf.
). Today this juxtaposition of trends has devel-
oped into a situation where processes of urban
sprawl, dissolution of the urban fabric and even re-
urbanisation are occurring almost simultaneously.
Correspondingly, thus far it is hardly possible to sub-
sume the east German case of urban sprawl into any
of the models describing a generalised sequential
pattern of urban development (probably the most
prominent of which in Europe was put forward by
The features and trends outlined indicate that ur-
ban development in eastern Germany could proba-
bly not be understood satisfactorily if merely
interpreted as an accelerated repetition of the pro-
cesses to which towns and cities in ‘the West’ were
formerly subject. On the other hand, eastern Ger-
many’s towns and cities have undeniably become
more similar to their ‘sprawling’ counterparts in
the western half of the country, with their urban
areas expanding and with homes, workplaces, shops
and amenities spreading farther apart. Moreover, ur-
ban policy has quickly adopted west German pat-
terns. This is particularly true regarding the
planning system, the role of the welfare state as to
both providing social housing and promoting private
housebuilding, the refurbishment of historical city
centers, and urban regeneration. At the same time,
there is hardly any evidence of an ‘Americanisation
of urban development’ in eastern Germany as
claimed by
. In comparison to
US cities, the scale of sprawl is still rather moderate
throughout Germany (in terms of housing, services
and, despite many oversized peripheral shopping
centres, retailing). Also, there are no signs of the
extensive inner-city abandonment which has been
typical of urban development in the US since the
1970s (
), supporting the general
thesis that urban decline in Europe has by no means
reached a similar degree to the US: ‘yet, despite
technical networks, global cities, urban sprawl, and
city networks, European cities remain fairly robust,
although less dominant and more uncertain because
of the rise of more or less integrated city-regions’
(
Compared to cities and towns in eastern Europe,
urban development in eastern Germany also bears
some resemblance to post-socialist development pat-
terns shaped by the deep transformation crisis; this
concerns in particular the heavy deindustrialisation
as a result of marginalisation on the world market,
falling economic and population figures and, last
but not least, the decline or even disappearance of
the symbols of the ‘socialist city’ (the elimination
or reconstruction of major building ensembles, the
decline of the large housing estates). Against this
background,
forecasted a
general loss in urbanity, with ‘eastern Europe (. . .)
becoming a demographic buffer zone between the
Third World and western Europe’. From this point
of view, eastern Germany appears to be an ‘inner
periphery’ between western and eastern Europe.
(b) Considering the primary causes and effects of
urban sprawl makes the specificity of the east Ger-
man situation even more apparent. The driving
forces of urban sprawl—interests and resources in
the socioeconomic sphere, suburban values, habits
and lifestyles in the sociocultural sphere—were,
and often still are, not very pronounced. Since east-
ern Germany has been experiencing a period of de-
cline with respect to both economic activity and
population there ought to have been little economic
pressure to develop new land for urban uses under
‘normal’ conditions. And as far as the values, habits
and lifestyles of the east German people are con-
cerned, it is at least uncertain whether a consider-
able number of them really conceived of living in
suburbia when German unification started—because
at that time towns and cities had long provided bet-
ter living conditions and a ‘culture of allotments’ had
developed, which seemed to meet the desire for
a ‘green life’ fairly well. However, pressure for
4
Furthermore, in the urban regions of western Germany a kind of
‘mature sprawl’—i.e. an urbanisation of suburbs in terms of
functional and social differentiation—prevails in an ‘inner subur-
ban zone’ that is surrounded by an ‘outer zone’ characterised by a
weakly controlled, land-consuming and mostly monofunctional
ribbon and/or leapfrogging development of urban structures (e.g.
). In eastern Germany, no such
‘zoning’ exists. Instead the ‘outer zone’ seems to begin immedi-
ately beyond the large housing estates.
The ‘production’ of urban sprawl in eastern Germany as a phenomenon of post-socialist transformation: Henning Nuissl and Dieter Rink
131
greenfield development was strongly encouraged by
governmental activities—by the combination of
extraordinarily powerful fiscal incentives to invest
in the real estate and housing sector, the permissive
character of spatial planning, which was increased by
the weakness of the local authorities, and specific
barriers to inner-city developments, in particular
due to the restitution law. The final push came from
land developers and construction companies pro-
moting their products. Thus, instead of being a mat-
ter of fate (in a non-totalitarian environment), urban
sprawl in post-socialist eastern Germany was mainly
induced by a limited set of clearly definable param-
eters for the decisions of investors and households
which stemmed from a peculiar mix of governmental
‘over-’ and ‘under-regulation’. Its character hence
hardly tallies with the predominating theoretical ef-
forts to explain urban development, which are
mostly concerned with market processes and the
struggle for local power between different social
groups (that take place in a context of growth, e.g.
). Instead, we find support
for the argument that ‘there are important geo-
graphic variations in sprawl, implying that it is nei-
ther inevitable nor universal’ (
). From this perspective, urban develop-
ment and sprawl in eastern Germany display an
‘extremely’ European nature in that the European
case of urban sprawl has generally been found to
be shaped by public policy and the public sector to
a greater extent than in the US (cf.
). Then again, the overwhelming impor-
tance of national public policy for urban sprawl in
eastern Germany adds a distinct quality that is not
present throughout Europe.
The ‘management of urban sprawl’ debate
The simultaneity of urban sprawl and urban decline
has posed a major challenge to urban policy-making
and planning in eastern Germany. To put it some-
what bluntly, the problem is that too few people
and facilities are ‘sloshing around’ in an oversized
urban container, which, moreover, was until recently
growing dramatically. An estimated 1.5 million
unoccupied apartments in eastern Germany make
spatial planning a particularly difficult task, much
more difficult than in a situation where the push
for growth has to be steered into the most desirable
directions. What’s more, we have to be ready for a
new round of urban deterioration in eastern Ger-
many, since in all probability the population decline
will become especially severe after 2010 when the
proportion between deaths and births becomes even
more unbalanced than today (cf.
Against this background, we must expect what is
currently the most striking problem of urban devel-
opment in eastern Germany not only to persist but
to gain even more importance. The physical fabric
of towns and cities will increasingly prove oversized,
threatening entire city districts (or even towns) with
decay—or, at best, dissolution. This will probably
result in the wide-ranging ‘perforation’ of urban
eastern Germany since only selected urban areas—
especially in the inner cities of the most successful
urban regions—will see stabilisation and further
improvement. Besides, the most thriving suburban
centres—not least the most successful shopping
malls, with offices, service and leisure facilities hav-
ing sprung up around them—may develop further
into a kind of tiny ‘edge cities’, whilst other parts
of suburbia will probably share the fate of decline
with their inner-city predecessors. In particular, the
partial demolition of large-scale housing estates
(which are especially prone to losing population)
will remain on the agenda.
Given this outlook, the main task for urban and
regional governance must be not only to avoid fur-
ther sprawl but to redirect the dynamics of urban
development so as to support urban restructuring
or even contraction. This could also mean ‘subur-
bia-like’ settlement structures in the inner city by
the low-density redevelopment of brownfields, suc-
cessful examples of which are provided by many
old industrialised English cities (cf.
). Only innovative strategies and instruments
will provide a chance to pursue this task since it
faces various difficulties (cf.
). One such
difficulty arises from the very fact that the instru-
ments and means at hand for urban policy and plan-
ning are designed to organise growth, not decline
(which is reflected by the discussion on strategies
to curb sprawl being largely focused on the problem
of growth (e.g.
Brueckner, 2000; Leo et al., 1998
Hence, any successful attempt to counter urban
sprawl in eastern Germany will probably require a
further development of legal tools—which indeed
has recently taken place with the reform of German
planning law. Another difficulty stems from the lack
of a morphological ‘guiding star’ as to the future of
urban eastern Germany. Nowadays, urban politi-
cians and planners are still committed to the idea
of the ‘European city’ with its solid outward appear-
ance. This commitment is further corroborated by
the global discourse on sustainability and its concern
for sustainable urban form (cf.
).
On the other hand, it is increasingly at odds with the
undeniable signs of dissolution of the ‘European
city’ (which was preserved so well in socialist times).
Currently, there is at least broad agreement that ori-
entation towards the historical form and function of
towns and cities might not be sufficient as a leitmotif
for urban management in eastern Germany. None-
theless, it is still open to discussion what new urban
paradigm could be convincing enough to replace the
idea of the preservation of the ‘European city’
(
Seen from a somewhat dialectical point of view,
the recent period of urban sprawl in eastern Ger-
many bears some hope that there is a chance of
The ‘production’ of urban sprawl in eastern Germany as a phenomenon of post-socialist transformation: Henning Nuissl and Dieter Rink
132
preventing unwanted greenfield developments in fa-
vour of the necessary urban restructuring processes
as it shows (once again) that ‘suburbanization was
not an historical inevitability created by geography,
technology, and culture, but rather the product of
government policies’ (
), with fiscal
regulation at the national level being of particular
importance (cf.
). Since
urban sprawl in eastern Germany is above all a
reflection of (national) governmental policy, it pro-
vides an example of how spatial dynamics can be
influenced most effectively, albeit with an outcome
which is largely undesirable. However, it remains
up in the air whether a set of laws and fiscal regula-
tions aimed at the sparse use of land could be only
half as successful at containing urban sprawl—i.e.
at preventing businesses, politicians and households
from consuming more land—as governmental policy
was at fostering it in eastern Germany in the 1990s.
Hence, further research is needed, especially in the
field of land use management in declining regions,
so as to find feasible ways of dealing with the spatial
resources by exploiting the fact that a vast amount of
derelict land within settlements is waiting to be
reused.
Acknowledgements
This paper is based on work undertaken as a contri-
bution to the URBS PANDENS research project,
funded by the European Commission under Fifth
Framework Programme on Research and Techno-
logical Development and co-ordinated by the Pots-
dam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).
The authors gratefully acknowledge the criticisms
and suggestions made by the anonymous referees
and the editor.
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The ‘production’ of urban sprawl in eastern Germany as a phenomenon of post-socialist transformation: Henning Nuissl and Dieter Rink
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Document Outline
- The " production " of urban sprawl in eastern Germany as a phenomenon of post-socialist transformation
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