Geographica Helvetica (Aug 2024)

Suspended in time? Peripheralised and “left behind” places in Germany

  • J. Royer,
  • T. Leibert

DOI
https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-79-221-2024
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 79
pp. 221 – 237

Abstract

Read online

The term “left behind” has regained attention with the increasing signs of political dissatisfaction in the Global North, e.g. the rise of right-wing populist parties and politicians. In Germany, terms such as abgehängte Regionen (suspended regions) or “structurally weak” regions are often employed as alternatives. However, there is a certain fuzziness in these terminologies, as they often encompass different spatial scales and temporal dependencies and refer to a variety of regions, e.g. deindustrialising cities as well as peripheral and remote rural areas. Our approach conceptualises “left-behindness” as an outcome of peripheralisation. This allows for a theory-based selection of social, economic, and infrastructural indicators to operationalise left-behindness in Germany at the NUTS3 (nomenclature of territorial units for statistics) level with combining a factor analysis and a k-means cluster analysis. The former resulted in four dimensions of left-behindness with distinct spatial patterns, leading to the classification of six regional types, characterised by varying scores for the four dimensions.