Monitoring Social Urban Development 2009

The update of the Monitoring Social Urban Development 2009 presented here evaluates for the first time socio-structural data for the observation period 31.12.2007 to 31.12.2008 exclusively at the level of the 447 planning rooms (smallest level of the world-oriented spaces/LOR). With the update of the Monitoring Social Urban Development in 2009, the statistical method of the stepped index calculation will continue in the same way as monitoring in 2008 and 2007. The 12 indicators of the 2008 monitoring will be maintained except for one exception: the indicator Status 6 “Foreigner’s share under 18” is replaced by the “share of people with a migrant background under 18 years”, as this data is now also available in small-scale areas. In contrast to the monitoring reports produced at traffic cell level in 2008 and 2007, this new indicator enters into the result calculation of the indices. Data have been differentiated since 2007 between indicators describing the social situation in a neighbourhood (“status”) and indicators designed to characterise the change in the population of the area in the past year (“dynamics”). Status indicators include unemployment, transfer and migrant background data; on the dynamic indicators data on mobility (selective migrations) and the changes of individual status indicators. From the six status indicators and the six dynamic indicators, a status index and a dynamic index are first formed in the stepped calculation method. In a next step, the development index is calculated from the status and dynamic index in a ratio of 3:2. The development index depicts the social problem in the area as a value: the higher the value, the higher the social problem. According to the determined ranking of the regions, deciles (each 10 percent) are formed and grouped into four groups of the development index: high (upper 20 percent), medium (60 percent), lower (ultimately 10 percent) and very low development index (last 10 percent). There is a need for intervention and prevention in areas with a very low development index, according to these — quantitative — findings of urban development policy intervention. In order to define concrete measures in each area, in addition to the quantitative analysis, in-depth and in particular qualitative considerations are needed. Despite the change of the spatial level from the 338 traffic cells to the 447 planning rooms, the results of the 2009 monitoring are similar to those of 2008: The development index shows a strong spatial concentration of the planning spaces with a “very low development index”. As in the past, the western inner-city areas represent the most problematic types of areas in Berlin. Spatial concentrations are present in Neukölln-Nord, Wedding, Moabit and Kreuzberg-Nord. On the outskirts of the city, negative development tendencies (Marzahn-Hellersdorf, Spandau) have continued to grow in the large settlement areas and have partly expanded in terms of space. These five large, contiguous areas with the highest concentration of the most problematic areas, already named in the 2008 monitoring, form the core of the “action areas plus” defined by the Senate Department for Urban Development. The eastern inner-city areas, on the other hand, have continued to stabilise.