Industrial cities: Crisis, perception of crises and alternatives in urban development in the second half of the 20th century

对工业城市的历史研究主要集中在工业化和成长的过程，包括“社会主义城市”。然而，减少和衰退的时代并没有引起太多的注意。特别是城市增长、收缩与转型的相互依存关系尚未得到系统的研究。此外，对中等城市的研究和比较研究较少。最后，工业城市的历史研究忽视了建立一个适当的理论分析框架来解释和背景化实证结果。理论模型——比如路径依赖的概念——在很大程度上被忽视了。随着路径依赖的解释潜力在其核心，计划的项目打算要求这样一个框架的潜力，在此基础上，其经验密集的结果。该项目首先关注危机的感知和影响，其次关注工业城市克服这些危机所采用的策略。四个深入的案例研究围绕工业中心的危机经验和应对。这些案例研究有意涵盖了不同类型的工业部门：<s:1>塞尔斯海姆和沃尔夫斯堡是汽车城市，Völklingen是钢铁城市，威廉港是港口城市。对于这些工业中心，拟议的项目比较地考察了网络、行动者联盟及其行动范围。这一对比还分析了全球经济日益增长的相互依存以及这四个城市之间的竞争。这有助于更好地理解20世纪下半叶德国城市去工业化的概念和表现。总而言之，该项目旨在通过比较不同类型的城市和开发一个模型来解释这些变化，来展示去工业化和转型这两个双重过程的社会相关性。

Historical research on industrial cities has mainly focused on processes of industrialization and growth, including the "socialist city". Times of decrease and decline, however, have not gained much attention. Particularly the interdependency and relationship of growth, shrinking, and the transformation of cities have not been systematical studied. Moreover, research on middle-sized cities and comparative studies are lacking. Finally, historical research on industrial cities has neglected to develop a proper theoretical framework of analysis to explain and contextualize empirical results. Theoretical models - such as the concept of path dependency - have been largely ignored. With the explanatory potential of path dependency at its heart, the planned project intends to ask for the potential of such a framework within which to base its empirically dense results. The project concentrates, firstly, on the perceptions and effects of crisis and, secondly, on the strategies employed in overcoming these crises in industrial cities. Four in-depth case studies revolve around the experience of and the reactions to crisis in industrial centers. These case studies deliberately cover different types of industrial sectors: Rüsselsheim and Wolfsburg as automobile cities, Völklingen as steel town, and Wilhelmshaven as port city. For these industrial centers, the proposed project comparatively examines the networks, the coalitions of actors and their scope of action. The comparison additionally analyses the increasing global economic interdependency and the competition between the four cities in question. It thus contributes to a better understanding of the concept and manifestations of deindustrialization in German cities in the second half of the 20th century. In all, the project intends to demonstrate the societal relevance of the twin processes of deindustrialization and transformation by both comparing different types of cities and developing a model to explain these changes.