E-Book, Deutsch, Englisch, Band 17, 196 Seiten
Knoll Cities – Regions – Hinterlands
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-3-7065-6163-1
Verlag: Studien Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Metabolisms, Markets, and Mobilities Revisited
E-Book, Deutsch, Englisch, Band 17, 196 Seiten
Reihe: Jahrbuch für Geschichte des ländlichen Raumes
ISBN: 978-3-7065-6163-1
Verlag: Studien Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
For centuries, cities have entertained close relationships of various kinds and qualities with their – adjoining or non-contiguous – hinterlands, the latter being structured around zones of agricultural production, transport corridors such as river systems, shipping routes or railway lines, market relations, but also issues of political domination, or landownership. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the blurring and re-negotiation of city-hinterland-relations under the auspices of fossil-fueled, industrialized and globalized economies and transitions in the energy base of societies became a dominant factor. A variety of new social forms of mobility, such as intra- and interregional migration, daily commuting and tourism, strengthened and at the same time complicated the interwovenness. Taking stock of regional case studies in Austria, Denmark, and Italy, this theme issue reflects on the historically changing relations between cities and rural areas, and on the factors which let cities and their hinterlands appear as a ‘region’ with a distinct social ecology and with a distinct economic, social and cultural profile. Particular emphasis is to be given to the ‘making’ and ‘unmaking’ of regions, the development of market relations over time, the changing framework conditions in terms of political constitution as well as changes in land use and the urbanizing effects of tourism in peripheral regions.
Seit Jahrhunderten unterhalten Städte enge und komplexe Beziehungen mit ihrem jeweiligen Hinterland. Strukturiert wurden diese Hinterländer durch Zonen der landwirtschaftlichen Produktion, Verkehrskorridore, Marktbeziehungen, aber auch durch politische Dominanz oder Grundeigentum. Im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert wurden die Stadt-Hinterland-Beziehungen unter den Vorzeichen fossilenergetischer, industrialisierter und globalisierter Ökonomien und Gesellschaften neu verhandelt. Mobilitätsformen wie Migration und Tourismus intensivierten und komplizierten das Beziehungsgefüge. Basierend auf Fallstudien zu Österreich, Dänemark und Italien untersucht das Jahrbuch die sich historisch wandelnden Beziehungen zwischen Städten und ländlichen Gebieten sowie die Produktion sozio-ökonomischer, sozial-ökologischer und kultureller Regionalität.
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Martin Knoll Cities – Regions – Hinterlands Revisited
Darmstadt and the complexity of urban-rural relations
From 1948 to 1954, an interdisciplinary research project attempted to provide a new and sound understanding of the increasingly multifaceted relationships between cities and hinterlands in early post-World War II Germany.1 The project was initiated by Nels Anderson (1889–1986), a sociologist trained at the famous Chicago School of Urban Sociology and civil employee of the US military government in Germany’s US zone. It was part of the American recovery policy that strove to integrate re-education, reorientation, and cultural transfer.2 From 1950 onward, the project was led by agronomist Max Rolfes (1894–1981) and philosopher Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969). For their “German Middletown Survey”, the team of researchers chose the area around the Hessian city of Darmstadt, a community of 91,846 inhabitants by 1949,3 a region well-suited as a study object. Situated between the far larger Frankfurt to the north, the medium-sized cities of Mainz to the north-west as well as Mannheim and Heidelberg to the south, and the peripheral mountainous area of the Odenwald to the south-east, it was (and still is) characterised by a dense structural mix of highly urbanised and industrialised zones, rural areas shaped by agriculture, and communities that increasingly attracted suburban dwellers. In the specific temporal context of the study, the consequences of the war still interfered considerably with all economic activities and everyday life. In terms of demography, displaced persons and forced migrants from formerly German settlements in Eastern Europe added to the mix of domestic urbanites, commuters, workers, and farmers. According to historian Franz-Werner Kersting, the project applied an innovative approach for the time in that it aimed to systematically focus on both the historically grown and the contemporary social structure of urban-rural relationships while simultaneously placing special emphasis on the specific individual experiences of the surveyed population.4 Kersting sees the study located at a historical turning point of scientific research into the relations between urban and rural spaces. Beginning in the 1950s, Western Europe saw fundamental transformation processes in agriculture, mobility, communication, and individual lifestyles. Suburbanisation was on the brink of becoming one of the most – if not the most – important aspect(s) of urbanisation.5 In short, the boundaries between cities and countryside were becoming ever more blurred. Research had to react to this complex constellation while at the same time carrying a heavy cultural burden that could potentially inhibit precise analysis. Kersting is correct in pointing out that research into urban-rural relations is part of “an overarching, culturally deeply rooted and powerful social discourse. The combination of city and country never was and never stands for only two dimensions of historical reality (in the narrower sense), but also for identity-related or identity-creating self-images and external images, some of which are strongly normative, ideological, and emotional.”6 Basic concepts and stereotypes of “the urban” and “the rural” have tended to overemphasise a binary logic labelling the rural sphere either as provincial, static, and backward in a pejorative sense or as harmonious and in tune with nature in a romanticising sense. The same applies to the image of the urban sphere, which is seen as an arena of modernity and progress respectively as a site of pollution, moral decline, and social unrest. This cultural burden is not only problematic in terms of misleading analyses of recent phenomena. In historical research, it may also blur the fact that even in premodern societies, city-hinterland relations were intense, complex, and multidimensional. The Darmstadt survey chose four communities besides the midsize city itself that were considered representative for the structural evidence: one community representing residential housing with a partially suburban character, another representing a working-class suburban community, and two communities with a mix of working and farming populations – one of them with a more dominating presence of working-class housing, the other possessing a largely rural and agrarian character.7 By measuring several parameters, the survey intended to delineate the “natural area” of Darmstadt. One parameter was the trading distance of dairy products and other fresh agricultural products processed and traded in Darmstadt, the second was the distance travelled by daily commuters, and the third encompassed the “cultural sphere of influence” measured in terms of the dissemination of Darmstadt’s daily newspaper, the hometowns of students receiving higher education in the city, and the regional spread of audiences attending shows at Darmstadt’s provincial public theatre.8 Though obviously influenced by older concepts like those proposed by Johann Heinrich von Thünen (1783–1850) in his 1826 work Der isolierte Staat (The Isolated State) or in Walter Christaller’s (1893–1969) Die zentralen Orte in Süddeutschland (Central Places in Southern Germany) of 1933, the project’s research design went significantly beyond a logic merely interested in questions of centrality and periphery – and in doing so perhaps somewhat overestimated the culturally equalising effect of urban lifestyles in the countryside, as Kersting argues.9 City-hinterland relations revisited
The research interest of the Darmstadt survey – along with Kersting’s question whether and how the Darmstadt team acknowledged the fundamental contemporary transformations in urban-rural relations in their research – provide a valid starting point for this issue of Rural History Yearbook. The volume aims to reflect on the historically changing relations between cities and rural areas as well as on the factors that let cities and their hinterlands appear as identifiable “regions” with a distinct social ecology and a specific economic, social, and cultural profile. The editor and authors are well aware that in the nineteenth and even more dramatically in the twentieth century, there was “something new under the sun”.10 Fossilfuelled, industrialised and globalised economies, transitions in the energy base of societies, and the corresponding policies of national states became major drivers for the blurring and renegotiation of city-hinterland relations. A variety of new social forms of mobility such as intra- and interregional migration, daily commuting over growing distances, and of course tourism strengthened and simultaneously complicated the interweaving between cities and their environs. But it would be unhistorical to deny the fact that even well before the era of the “Great Acceleration”11 and globalised hinterlands, cities usually entertained close relationships of various kinds and qualities with their – adjoining or non-contiguous – hinterlands from which they drew the provisions to maintain their metabolism in terms of energy, food and feed, and raw materials. Semi-finished products and trade goods as foundations of urban gateway functions could also be part of the story, as could migration patterns. Hinterlands could be structured around transport corridors such as river systems, shipping routes, or railway lines. Finally, issues of political domination, powers granted by state governments to control and monopolise resources in a given area, and ownership of land and the associated resources could likewise be instrumental in creating and maintaining hinterlands. On the other hand, viewed from the perspective of the towns and villages surrounding urban centres, relations to the “central” city could be constituted for a variety of reasons and motives like the search for markets for agricultural surpluses or a centre for education, entertainment, legal services, and religious rituals and worship. Tracing urban-rural relations in their sheer complexity therefore necessitates a long-term historical perspective that transcends the boundaries of contemporary and modern history. Urban history and the rural space
Urban historians have repeatedly emphasised the need for what David Nicholas calls an “essentially environment-driven view” of urbanisation.12 In their influential “Making of Urban Europe”, Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees put it as follows: “Urbanization is more than the result of certain global forces acting on many individual towns and rural areas, however, even with due regard to variations in time and space. As urban places grow, they interact with their rural surroundings, with one another, and with larger sociopolitical units. Indeed, if there is a single defining characteristic of urban life, even in the most fiercely independent and secure city, it is dependence. Not only are inhabitants interdependent, but the truly isolated city is both unviable and pointless. Unable to sustain itself, it would have no outlets for the fruits of specialization and complex organization.”13 The interest of urban historians in city-hinterland relations developed from origins in economic and social history and has spread far into various subdisciplines. In line with an opening of urban history to environmental history perspectives, city-hinterland relations have become a topic analysed as part of social ecology and...
