No abstract

Population shrinkage has become an unavoidable process in many cities and calls for new planning approaches. Typically, economic restructuring causes small urban centres in peripheral locations to lose economic functions and population. In small towns however, social capital has been considered as a specific resource. In this article, we focus on small postsocialist towns in Estonia and Central Germany that have mostly experienced severe shrinkage since the end of state socialism, especially during the first transition decade. We aim to clarify to what extent local planning strategies accept the ongoing shrinkage and how various forms of local social capital have contributed to these strategies and the development of the localities in general. Interviews with different stakeholders in selected towns in Estonia and Germany revealed that shrinkage has not been systematically accepted in local planning. Instead, planning is strongly steered by the external financial resources to strengthen the remaining urbanity. In all towns, specific key development niches have been found in the 2000s to compensate for the peripherality. We also demonstrate that local public institutions need to adjust their governance culture to the existing specific local forms of social capital in order to achieve synergy between local actors.

Zusammenfassung Nationale Grenzen innerhalb der Europäischen Union sind offene Begegnungsräume transnationaler Lebenswelten geworden. Durch die Schengen-Abkommen ist die Freizügigkeit der EU-Bürger gewährleistet, was zu neuen Formen internationaler Migration führt und den europäischen Integrationsprozess auf lokaler Ebene verdeutlicht. Dabei wandern Menschen ins Nachbarland, um dort zu wohnen oder zu arbeiten. Es entstehen so grenzüberschreitende Wohn- und Arbeitsmärkte, die eine Transnationalisierung der Lebenswelten zwischen den beiden Nachbarstaaten bedeutet. Anhand der Fallstudien der Gemeinde Perl im Saarland und des Amts Löcknitz-Penkun in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern werden in diesem Beitrag grenzüberschreitende Lebenswelten untersucht. Dabei beeinflussen eine stark wachsende Region (Luxemburg bzw. Stettin) auf der einen Seite der nationalstaatlichen Grenze und eine ländlich strukturschwache Region auf der deutschen Seite der Grenze diese Prozesse wesentlich. Die beiden Fallstudien zeigen den Umgang mit diesem grenzüberschreitenden Phänomen sowie raumwirksame Implikationen.

In recent years, various low-threshold and often creative methods and tools have been developed, considering the specific requirements of vulnerable persons to explore their identities, experiences, knowledge, opinions and needs. The idea of LEGO® Serious Play® is based on play pedagogy. Playing allows to distance oneself from everyday life by sliding into a world of imaginations, ideas and utopias while concurrently keeping the ties to reality (Heimlich, 2015). LEGO® Serious Play® uses metaphors to enable participants to express playfully their thoughts and ideas. As the building process with Lego bricks is physical and haptic, LEGO® Serious Play® is a low-threshold method to work with vulnerable groups (Cavaliero, 2017). The following article will concentrate on the use of LEGO® Serious Play® as creative exploration method and its possibilities and limitations when used to empower young migrants in vulnerable conditions in the Germany and Luxembourg in the H2020 research project MIMY.