The analysis of neighborhood changes by means of a dwelling panel in two residential areas of Cologne - Sixth wave

• Applicants: Dr. Alice Barth; Professor Dr. Jörg Blasius
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research ; Human Geography
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 457265520

Started in 2010 by Prof. Jörg Blasius and Prof. Jürgen Friedrichs, the Cologne Dwelling Panel now comprises five waves, the last of which was conducted in 2022. The panel offers the unique opportunity of long-term observation of two inner-city neighborhoods in Cologne-Mülheim and Cologne-Deutz. What is special about this panel is that the sample units are not the residents but the apartments. In each wave, more than 1000 apartments in the sample are revisited, and a standardized face-to-face interview is conducted with a current resident. In the case of relocations, a new resident of the in-moving household is interviewed, while the sample of apartments remains unchanged. This enables the analysis of both intra-individual changes at the resident level and changes in the socio-demographic structure in the two neighborhoods without introducing bias due to moves (among other things, younger people move significantly more often than older people). With this application, we request funding for data collection and analysis for another - the sixth - wave of the dwelling panel. Including this wave, the total study period would be 15 years, which opens up a variety of analysis options regarding changes in the neighborhoods’ social structure, residents’ attitudes, lifestyles, and perceptions of the neighborhood as well as housing characteristics, the current rent level and rent burden of households and conversions from rental to owner-occupied housing. We analyze the changes in the two neighborhoods primarily against the theoretical backdrop of gentrification processes, incorporating different dimensions of gentrification (social, functional, physical, economical, and symbolic) and testing theoretical assumptions. The two neighborhoods are at different stages of the gentrification process: while the process was more advanced in Deutz at the beginning of the study, the Mülheim neighborhood has since caught up. In response to the ongoing gentrification in Cologne-Mülheim, the city of Cologne enacted a social preservation statute in early 2022 to protect the long-established residents from displacement. When the dwelling panel is continued, the effects of this policy measure can be described empirically at different levels. In the new project phase, we would also like to conduct small-scale analyses and link the survey data from the dwelling panel with digital geodata, using information from the Immoscout24 real estate portal and the City of Cologne's "Open Data" platform, among others. In addition, the symbolic dimension of gentrification will be further analyzed by comparing external representations of the areas (media reports in the press and internet portals) and self-perceptions of the residents.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants