Urban demographics & Urban analytics
13.00 – 13.30 Post-COVID urban population trends and projections for Germany
– Frank Swiaczny, senior researcher at the German Federal Institute for Population Research
Urban population trends, under conditions of below replacement fertility and rising life expectancy, are increasingly dependent on the scale and direction of internal and international migration. In Germany, both – trends in internal and international migration – were highly volatile and changed direction over the past decades. Since the early 2000’s, many urban areas have been growing due to a positive migration balance.
As migrants are on average younger than the sedentary population of sending and receiving regions, urban areas are nowadays often demographically younger than suburban and rural regions. Rural areas in particular faced losses of internal migrants to cities. With few international migrants settling in rural regions (despite the large inflow of refugees), migration trends contributed to the ongoing ageing and shrinking of rural populations in Germany. Suburban areas, on the other hand, were prone to ageing in place of the first waves of suburbanisation. They are also getting older, on average, than the cities. Re-urbanisation, in recent decades, replaced the prevailing suburbanisation that lasted from the 1960’s to the 1990’s.
Since COVID, migration patterns have changed. International migration came to a halt during lock-down. Internal migration also declined as buying or renting property and moving places was almost impossible during COVID. Many large cities recorded a negative population balance in those years. Since COVID, there are also indications that internal migration patterns over the life course may have changed permanently. Working from home increased the commuting zone of cities into rural areas and an increasing shortage of affordable housing in most large cities contributed to push-factors, affecting urban population trends.
The presentation will focus on those current changes in internal and international migration, using most recent migration data by NUTS-3 regions (Kreise) classified by the degree of urbanisation. The presentation also presents preliminary results from regional population projections prepared by the Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB) in collaboration with the Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development (BBSR), using scenarios that reflect the degree of uncertainty of future trends and spatial patterns in internal and international migration.
Results show that by 2070, the population of large cities will only fall below current figures for scenarios with assumptions of a low international migration balance. Contrary, populations of the most rural category of counties will only remain slightly above current figures for a scenario that combines high international migration with sub-/counter-urbanisation assumptions for internal migration.
Frank Swiaczny is senior researcher at the German Federal Institute for Population Research, and Executive Director of the German Society for Demography, former Assistant Director of the UN Population Division in New York.
13.30 – 14.00 Property Prices and New Information on Flood Risks
– Greta Fredriksson, PhD student at Institute for Housing and Urban research, Uppsala University
14.00 – 14.30 Out-migration from Oslo during and after COVID-19
– Marianne Tønnessen, researcher at Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research (NIBR), OsloMet
Record high numbers of people left the capital Oslo and moved to other parts of Norway during the Covid-19 years 2020 and 2021. A previous study (Tønnessen 2021) showed that a large share of the out-movers in 2020 were people with jobs where teleworking most likely was possible, and that the large majority moved to the nearby county of Viken.
Now that the pandemic is over, it is possible to examine whether these trends have continued, and also how migration into Oslo has changed during the last couple of years. Updated numbers, including data on the situation so far in 2023, will be shown at the conference.
Marianne Tønnessen is a demographer and a researcher at Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research (NIBR), OsloMet.
14.30 – 15.00 Rural rendezvous – modelling feet voting of leisure explorers before, during and after corona times
– Marina Toger, Associate Professor at Department of Geography, Uppsala University
15.00 – 15.30 Mapping Individuals’ Immediate Surroundings: Creating a Land Use Database
– Jakob Granath, PhD at Department of Economics, Uppsala University