German Institute of Urban Affairs

Although municipalities in Germany do not have their own constitutional level of government similar to the federal government or Länder , they make an essential contribution to the provision of goods and services of general interest. Municipalities, granted autonomy in self-government by the constitution, operate in a highly charged and politically contested area of governance. On the one hand, municipalities enjoy the right to self-government, and neither the federal government nor the Länder may interfere with this arbitrarily. On the other, as a constitutional part of the Länder , the municipalities are dependent on them, especially so in financial terms. As a result, municipalities constantly have to balance their derived responsibilities with their voluntary tasks as both formal expectations and specific demands from citizens continue to grow due to a constantly changing global conditions and new types of crises. Municipalities in Germany are torn between fulfilling their administrative implementation mandate, on the one hand, and responding to the more immediate claims of local politics and their constituencies, on the other.

While the 2030 agenda addresses the United Nation member states primarily at their national levels, municipalities play a crucial role in implementing all of the 17 SDGs and many of the 169 targets. These processes must be monitored and evaluated. However, the UN indicators are not sufficiently applicable to the local context. Therefore, a multi-stakeholder working group was formed in Germany to develop a comprehensive set of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) indicators for municipalities, together with additional instruments to support local SDG monitoring such as an SDG data portal. The first catalogue which included 47 core SDG indicators was published in 2018. According to consecutive evaluations and practical tests, the indicator set was substantially expanded and revised to a final number of 120 SDG indicators. About half of the 120 indicators are provided with local-level data and the other half must be assessed individually for comprehensive local SDG monitoring. Likewise, accompanying tools were relaunched with additional functionalities. Although this new and unique set of indicators now covers a majority of the municipally relevant targets, there are still some decisive monitoring gaps for various reasons. The strengths and weaknesses of our methodological approach, as well as implications for future research and practical developments, are discussed.

Commercial land use management that focuses on a future-oriented urban and regional devel-opment must address multiple goals. Effective policy mixes need to simultaneously (1) improve city-regional and inter-municipal cooperation, (2) reduce land take, and (3) assure the long-term economic development of a region. Using the Northern Black Forest in Germany as a case study, we brought together planning and land use research with public policy analysis. We applied cross-impact balances (CIB) to build and analyze a participatory policy-interaction model. To-gether with a group of 12 experts, we selected effective individual measures to reach each of the three goals and analyzed their interactions. We then assessed the current policy mix and designed alternative policy mixes. The results demonstrate that current approaches to commercial land use management present internal contradictions and generate only little synergies. Implementing innovative measures on a stand-alone basis runs the risk of not being sufficiently effective. In particular, the current practice of competing for municipal marketing and planning of commercial sites has inhibiting effects. We identified alternative policy mixes that achieve all three goals, avoid trade-offs, and generate significant synergy effects. Our results point towards a more coherent and sustainable city-regional (commercial) land-use governance.

Zusammenfassung Die Beteiligung von Bürger*innen ist in deutschen Kommunen schon lange erprobt, ehrenamtliches Engagement trägt seit langem zur Funktionsfähigkeit von Kommunen und zur Lebensqualität in den Quartieren bei. Neu in der Diskussion stehen jedoch weitergehende Kooperationsformen, die unter dem Begriff „Koproduktion“ zusammengefasst werden. Verbunden ist mit Koproduktion die Erwartung an eine Zusammenarbeit mit neuen Akteuren, die Aufgaben übernehmen, die die Kommune nur noch schwer alleine erfüllen kann. Doch was „Koproduktion“ genau bedeutet und was sie unterscheidet von der bisherigen Mitwirkung von und der Zusammenarbeit mit Bürger*innen – das ist vor Ort meist unklar. Das Konzept der Koproduktion beleuchtet dieser einleitende Beitrag, der durch die nachfolgenden Reflexionen experimenteller Koproduktionen in der Stadt- und Regionalentwicklung vertieft wird.

Zusammenfassung Eine gemeinschaftlich organisierte Entwicklung von Städten, Gemeinden und Regionen entsteht nicht von selbst. Neue Partnerschaften müssen erst entwickelt, gelebt und als belastbar empfunden werden, um darauf weiter aufbauen zu können. Eine kommunale Verfahrenskultur, die auf Kooperation und Beteiligung ausgerichtet ist, kann so zur Basis für weitreichendere Formen des gemeinsamen Umsetzens werden. Hier setzten die geförderten Verbundprojekte der Fördermaßnahme „Kommunen innovativ“ an. Sie entwickelten und erprobten informelle Beteiligungsformate, bei denen Bürger*innen, zivilgesellschaftliche Akteure, Verwaltung und kommunale Entscheidungsträger*innen frühzeitig zusammenkamen und Möglichkeiten zur Beteiligung ausloteten. Dieser Text ordnet die Beiträge in Teil I „Beteiligung“ in den Diskurs um Beteiligung in der Stadt- und Regionalentwicklung ein.

Rising urban populations, limited natural resources (following the German Federal Environmental Agency, natural resources are resources that are part of nature. They include renewable and non-renewable primary raw materials, physical spaces (surface areas), environmental media (water, soil, air), flowing resources (e.g., geothermal, wind, tidal and solar energy) and biodiversity. It is irrelevant here whether the resources serve as sources for producing products or as sinks for absorbing emissions (water, soil, air)) and climate change require a new approach to urban planning. Recently, international, European and national programmes, concepts and framework documents have been created to promote the implementation of measures for more sustainability, resource efficiency and climate resilience in urban districts. In the funding measure of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research’s “Resource-Efficient Urban Districts for the Future-RES:Z”, twelve funded research project networks are dedicated to understanding the impacts that urban districts have on the resources of land, water and material flows, as well as the resulting impacts on urban green spaces and energy issues. By considering the different resources involved, it is shown that the optimisation of their use cannot take place independently of each other. This may even lead to conflicting goals. Use conflicts can be recognised at an early stage and measures can be tailored to the specific neighbourhood context when applying an integrated approach that provides a common view on all of the aforementioned resources. Special attention is paid to solutions which create numerous benefits i.e., multifunctionality. The RES:Z funding measure utilises living labs for the research on and implementation of solutions. This lays the foundation for a sustainable transformation of urban districts and the basis for further research.

This article explores the work of Erich Keyser, the creator and director of the State Regional Museum of Danzig History, which also functioned as the Museum of the Free City of Danzig. We discuss how Keyser conceptualised exhibitions, organised the collections and interacted with visitors. The article examines the way that Keyser envisioned the role of the museum as an educational and political space, where a transfer of knowledge took place, including right-wing and anti-Polish interpretations of the city’s past. In addition, the museum in Danzig (Polish: Gdańsk) serves as a case study for the analysis of the relationship between urban and rural space in city museums. The ambition of the exhibitions went beyond a representation of Danzig’s urban past, which led to an innovative attempt to combine urban and rural history in the frequently changing displays. Finally, the article discusses the significance of location for this city museum. It was somewhat exceptional, as it was a city museum located in a rural setting in the former Abbot’s Palace in the suburb of Oliva (Polish: Oliwa). Throughout we discuss the intersections of museology, political propaganda, education and nationalism in a city–state setting.

Die Sicherung und Entwicklung von Industrie- und Gewerbeflächen ist ein Schlüsselfaktor für die erfolgreiche Arbeit der kommunalen Wirtschaftsförderung. Vor dem Hintergrund der sich wandelnden Wirtschaft und der wachsenden Attraktivität städtischer Agglomerationsräume gewinnen jedoch zunehmend urbane Standortqualitäten und die Gestaltung neuer Nutzungsmischungen aus Wohnen und Arbeiten für die Gewerbeflächenentwicklung an Bedeutung. Die hier unter dem Begriff Wirtschaftsflächenkonzepte benannten kommunalen Fachkonzepte für Industrie und Gewerbe müssen deshalb neue konzeptionelle und strategische Lösungen für die räumlichen Auswirkungen aktueller Trends und sich ändernde Standortanforderungen finden.

Designing the system of local funding implies the allocation of different tax sources to local governments. This challenge is of particular interest in times of economic recession since tax revenues can stabilise local revenues and therefore limit the need of fiscal regulation. International organisations promote a shift from labour taxes towards less growth-deteriorating consumption taxes. The recommendations for local governments aim at an increase of property taxation, which yields rather stable revenues over the business cycle. At first glance, this advice seems to describe a path of optimisation, minimising adverse economic effects and providing local governments with more reliable revenues. From this starting point, we analyse local tax structures across Europe with Eurostat data from 2004 to 2018. This study reveals that in times of economic slowdown, the share of potentially more growth-deteriorating local income tax revenue increased relative to the share of consumption tax revenue. Moreover, revenue from the current local tax basket is quite dependent on cyclical variations. Both imply that there is room for improving local government tax structures. However, although there are criteria for an optimal local tax structure, revenues should match the set of public services. As local governments provide quite heterogeneous sets, there is no one-size-fits-all solution.

Although local governments are essential providers of public services and infrastructure across Europe, they ultimately depend on funding from higher levels of government. The clear relevance of local government finances necessitates effective regulation in order to ensure financial sustainability, but as of yet there has been hardly any comparative research regarding this particular topic. The 18 chapters contained in this volume bring together the work of 40 experts in the disciplines of political science, economics, and public administration research to approach the subject of local financial regulation in various scales and contexts across Europe. In this introductory chapter, we first outline key concepts such as fiscal decentralisation and regulation and briefly describe associated underlying theories and research. Secondly, we present comparative fiscal data to demonstrate the variance and trends of fiscal decentralisation across Europe. It also introduces the concept and components of regulatory regimes and develops the argument, that the effectiveness and outcome of fiscal regulation depends not only on the quality of individual components but also on the interactions of those components. We finally present the three guiding questions of this volume and provide a short overview of the chapters to follow.

European countries employ heterogeneous and complex systems to regulate local government budgets. Although the topic has become increasingly relevant in the face of past and future economic and budgetary crises, there is a lack of cross-country studies in this field, due in part to the institutional complexity of financial regulatory systems. With the help of extensive case study data processed with quantitative comparative analysis, we conduct a classification study which suggests a new way to analyse the commonalities in fiscal supervision structures, supervision routines and numerical fiscal rules in 21 European countries. In addition, we derive an aggregate index of regulatory strength. This allows us to identify a European north-southeast divide with looser regulatory regimes in the north. Such a pattern fits with existing theories of state traditions and might serve as useful heuristic for future debates about local government fiscal regulation.

Fiscal rules are institutional constraints on budget policymakers’ decision-making discretion aimed at fostering prudent fiscal policy, promoting overall fiscal discipline, and ensuring long-term fiscal sustainability. Since the European sovereign debt crisis, fiscal rules have been at the centre of the debate on the EU’s economic governance, the need to strengthen fiscal frameworks and improve policy co-ordination. This chapter outlines the origin, purpose, design, and coverage of local fiscal rules in EU countries over a decade after the 2008 financial crash. It presents a review of the empirical evidence on subnational fiscal rules and their impact and effectiveness on fiscal outcomes. The chapter ends with some concluding remarks and lessons drawn from the experience of fiscal rules across both time and space and outlines how policymakers can learn from this international experience.

Eine einheitliche Definition öffentlicher Unternehmen existiert ebenso wenig, wie eine in sich geschlossene Theorie öffentlicher Unternehmen. Gemäß der Definition der Finanzstatistik werden als öffentliche Unternehmen solche angesehen, an denen die öffentliche Hand die Kapital- oder Stimmrechtsmehrheit besitzt. Ein weiteres Charakteristikum öffentlicher Unternehmen ist ihr Betriebszweck, der darauf ausgerichtet ist, bestimmte öffentliche Bedarfe zu decken.