The impact of regional and neighbourhood deprivation on physical health in Germany: a multilevel study

Voigtländer S, Berger U, Razum O. The impact of regional and neighbourhood deprivation on physical health in Germany: a multilevel study. BMC Public Health. 2010;10(1): 403.Background There is increasing evidence that individual health is at least partly determined by neighbourhood and regional factors. Mechanisms, however, remain poorly understood, and evidence from Germany is scant. This study explores whether regional as well as neighbourhood deprivation are associated with physical health and to what extent this association can be explained by specific neighbourhood exposures. Methods Using 2004 data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) merged with regional and neighbourhood characteristics, we fitted multilevel linear regression models with subjective physical health, as measured by the SF-12, as the dependent variable. The models include regional and neighbourhood proxies of deprivation (i.e. regional unemployment quota, average purchasing power of the street section) as well as specific neighbourhood exposures (i.e. perceived air pollution). Individual characteristics including socioeconomic status and health behaviour have been controlled for. Results This study finds a significant association between area deprivation and physical health which is independent of compositional factors and consistent across different spatial scales. Furthermore the association between neighbourhood deprivation and physical health can be partly explained by specific features of the neighbourhood environment. Among these perceived air pollution shows the strongest association with physical health (-2.4 points for very strong and -1.5 points for strong disturbance by air pollution, standard error (SE) = 0.8 and 0.4, respectively). Beta coefficients for perceived air pollution, perceived noise and the perceived distance to recreational resources do not diminish when including individual health behaviour in the models. Conclusions This study highlights the difference regional and in particular neighbourhood deprivation make to the physical health of individuals in Germany. The results support the argument that specific neighbourhood exposures serve as an intermediary step between deprivation and health. As people with a low socioeconomic status were more likely to be exposed to unfavourable neighbourhood characteristics these conditions plausibly contribute towards generating health inequalities

European Cities in Globalization: A Comparative Analysis Based on the Location Strategies of Advanced Producer Services

Today there is a key question that lurks behind any consideration of Europe and its cities: is this foundation core zone of the modern world-system showing symptoms of dropping out of the contemporary core zone? It certainly appears that in the period of crises since 2008, Europe has been falling behind other major world-regions. Dubbed the “austerity region” of the world, such an interpretation sees Europe as the first part of the world-economy core to be subject to what are effectively structural adjustment programmes, largely self-imposed but still resulting in a process of peripheralization. Although uneven in impact, this is clearly a result of Europe’s states failing to adequately manage and regulate the economic activities within their territories. However it is far too soon to say whether such a monumental global economic shift is happening but we can investigate the current unevenness of economic globalization amongst European states. We compare three of these states that represent different degrees of potential peripheralization: Spain showing the stronger symptoms, Germany with least symptoms, and Britain somewhere in between. Our study is based upon an original analysis of advanced producer services that combines comparisons between countries and relations between cities

From places to flows? Planning for the new ‘regional world’ in Germany

This is a conference paper. The proceedings are available as a print publication from The Regional Studies Association: Contested Regions: Territorial Politics and Policy(2011) ISBN 978-1-897721-40-7 http://www.regionalstudies.org/publications/rsapub.aspThe last two decades have been dominated by discourses describing a resurgence of regions. Part and parcel of this discourse has been how leading proponents of what is labelled the ‘new regionalism’ documenting how the collapse of Atlantic Fordism and onset of globalization is seeing the region challenge the nation-state as the ‘natural economic zone’ (Ohmae, 1995), alongside its primacy as the site/scale at which economic management is conducted, social welfare delivered, and political subjects are identified by their national citizenship. Captivating academics (interested in interpreting capitalism’s new economic and spatial form) and policymakers (casting increasingly ‘envious eyes’ toward the regional zones of the Atlantic and European growth economies) alike, the new regionalist orthodoxy of the mid-to-late-1990s saw the region canonized in academic and political discourse as a functional space for economic planning and governance. Nevertheless, despite largely unprecedented levels of intellectual and political energy being invested in the conviction that regions are central to modern life, critics of the new regionalism generally, and normative claims relating to the formation of the ‘regional world’ in particular, responded to the blind faith in which regions were being championed to expose a series of deep-rooted problems, contradictions, and challenges. Of paramount concern among critics has been the exposition of widespread conceptual amnesia when it comes to defining the region. Often assumed, rarely defined, it is hard to dispute how the region remains an ‘object of mystery’ (Harrison, 2006), an ‘enigmatic concept’ (MacLeod and Jones, 2007), and a ‘complicated category’ (Paasi, 2010) for those trying to engage with this most durable of constructs. Even in the work of the political scientist, Michael Keating, one of the most consistently insightful scholars on this aspect of the new regionalism, while it is acknowledged that regions take various forms (e.g. administrative, cultural, economic, governmental, historical) his focus, and that of those advancing claims we were now living in a ‘regional world’, became narrowly focused and remained principally with regions as actual or potential subnational political units – be they administrative or governmental