中欧社会论坛 - China Europa Forum

Authors: Dr Beate Hollbach-Grömig and Dipl.-Soz. Jan Trapp

Date: mai 2006

Extract from ” Council of European Municipalities and Regions“

Published by German Institute of Urban Affairs

URL:

Introduction

All European countries are facing challenges from demographic change. These fundamental, serious developments have complex consequences for local and regional authorities. The impact of demographic changes will differ from city to city and from region to region. But they influence nearly every sphere of life: labour markets, housing markets, social security systems, infrastructure, urban/spatial planning, education, budgets and finances. Experience with the impact of demographic change has engendered strategies to face these developments in a number of countries and municipalities.

The study examines local authorities of different sizes in four countries, namely the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany and Spain. It gives a first impression by documenting and synthesising the challenges facing municipalities in different European countries, in different spatial contexts and the measures taking in response to demographic changes. Institutional settings in the four countries differ distinctly, e.g. in Finland all legislation is decided by Parliament, there are no local authorities that can pass their own laws, although municipalities in Finland have considerable independence in organising, e.g., local services. Germany, in contrast, has one of the politically and functionally strongest local government systems in Europe with a comparatively high degree of local autonomy.

The measures and case studies documented in this study should preferably cover the following categories of municipalities: a city with more than 500,000 inhabitants, a medium-sized city (around 50,000 inhabitants), a rural municipality and a small county, although it was quite difficult to maintain the differentiation throughout the study. This first approach focuses on four important policy fields:

• social services,

• spatial planning (especially housing and transport),

• employment and social inclusion,

• Local community activities.

The information basis for the study is mainly an Internet document search (search engines, list of keywords, links). One consequence of Internet-based information inquiry is that municipalities and projects not documented in the Internet are excluded from the survey. The second source was direct contacts with experts and officials in the selected countries. Gaps in the case study documentation regarding categories of municipalities or policy fields do not necessarily mean that there is no project at all. They merely indicate that the chosen methods and instruments under the given time constraints failed to capture any. All web-based documents quoted in this report were downloaded in November and December 2005.

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• English: doc_975.pdf (240 KiB)