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

Abstract

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.