Geteilte Räume – Strategien für mehr sozialen und räumlichen Zusammenhalt

Spatial inequality results from unequal economic dynamics and socio-economic inequalities. Spatial inequality is not seen as fundamentally problematic, but rather only if the cumulative occurrence of negative developments makes it increasingly difficult to reverse the trend and excludes people from participating in society as a whole. The expert commission therefore sees a need for political intervention in, firstly, peripheralized rural areas, secondly, marginalized industrial sites characterized by old industry and, thirdly, very socially polarized cities. The need for intervention at the federal, state and local level is concretized in nine strategies for greater social and spatial cohesion, which can be outlined and summarized as follows:

The principle of equivalence must be reinterpreted as a mandate to equip all regions with or provide access to vital public service infrastructures. The expert commission considers a greater involvement of the federal government to be necessary and advocates for a change in the constitutional limits of the federal government's participation in general infrastructures. The commission then proposes a new joint task, “Regional Public Services,” which would enable funding to be provided both in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods and in structurally weak regions.

Debt relief programs for structurally weak municipalities should enable sustainable debt relief in the medium term. Here too, the Commission sees a partial responsibility on the part of the federal government with regard to a nationwide comparative evaluation of debt relief programs and financial assistance for municipalities in need of consolidation.

Support programs should be geared more strongly toward local and regional development concepts, which policymakers develop together with citizens and the business community, as well as evaluate and update on a regular basis. Living conditions in rural areas of emigration are to be stabilized, although the Commission sees the immigration of refugees as an opportunity that has been underused and overlooked.

A socially mixed “productive” city should be aspired to. An active urban land policy, education policy and the promotion of local economies must all be pursued.

Municipal and regional public services should actively contribute to avoiding spatial and social inequality. The integration of people into the (regional) definition of vital infrastructures, on the one hand, and the influence of the public sector on the provision of public services, on the other, are decisive factors here.