Mobility and social exclusion in peripheral regions

ABSTRACT

Mobility largely depends on public services and constitutes a key factor for regional development. However, demographic and structural changes challenge public transport networks in peripheral regions and lead to economic shrinkage. This, in turn, undermines the principle of creating or maintaining equal living conditions across Germany and leads to spatial polarization. Limited mobility is closely connected to social exclusion and warrants an in-depth analysis. Our paper examines the commuting patterns of apprentices in rural Brandenburg, Germany. It is based on a survey of apprentices in tourism and the food industry. The study finds that apprentices in rural areas are confronted with public transport deficits but also apply strategies for dealing with these problems. The paper also shows how this relates to social exclusion and to current planning debates regarding co-production and digitalization in the context of public service provision.

KEYWORDS:

• Service provision
• mobility
• social exclusion
• peripheral regions
• apprentices

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the EPS reviewers for their helpful additional remarks, our partners of Wirtschaftsregion Lausitz contributing with their insights from the MORO process, as well as Tobias Mettenberger for his insightful comments on an early draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 By facilitating the circulation of goods, people and information, basic services have enabled the development of contemporary cities and regions in the western world. A safe and reliable infrastructure of this kind has become critical to the functioning of nearly all forms of production and to the public sector, the public healthcare sector, individual social practices and so on and so forth. Although basic services are seen as part of the urban infrastructure and traditionally viewed as an ‘engineering issue’, they are shaped by the ethics of basic service provision in that they should be affordable, reliable and universally accessible irrespective of a person’s income or location (Graham & Marvin, 2001; Schott, 2016).

2 Subject to the respective welfare system promoting social integration, the scope of services provided reveals a large variation.

3 The federal spatial planning report (ROB) (BBSR, 2017), distinguishes between mobility and transport. It defines mobility as an important requirement for modern societies to function and regards it, broadly speaking, as the capacity and actual movement across space. This, in turn, is determined by socio-demographic factors such as age, income and mobility impairments as well as transport options resulting from the respective spatial structure, infrastructure and public transport network.

4 The Spreewald project was part of the MORO Lebendige Regionen (vibrant regions) programme and was initiated and organized by the Wirtschaftsregion Lausitz GmbH, running from 2016 to 2018 (BMVI, 2016a, 2016b). Eighteen regions were selected by the Ministry of Mobility and Digital Infrastructure to connect public services, mobility and local supply (for a map on the 18 MORO regions, see BBSR, 2017, p. 117). As participants in the research project, we took part in workshops and meetings in which new solutions and approaches to mobility in rural areas were discussed.

5 The Spreewald region consists of four counties, namely Spree-Neiße, Dahme-Spreewald, Oberspreewald-Lausitz and the city of Cottbus.

6 Statistically, the apprentices could count as ‘poor’ as Germany classifies anyone as such who earns less than 892 euro per month (Arbeiterwohlfahrt Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, 2015, p. 4).

7 This correlates with the low percentage of individuals in rural regions engaged in carsharing (4%) in contrast to urban areas (22%), as shown by the German Mobility report for the ministry of transport and digital infrastructure (Nobis & Kuhnimhof, 2018, p. 37).

8 The federal spatial planning report (BBSR, 2017, p. 118) considers virtual mobility as indispensable to interlink existing and new resources of information, actors and infrastructures, likely leading to substitute realized, physical mobility in terms of real activities and ways (see also Saeed & Kurauchi, 2015).