Urban and Rural Chatter

 At some point this week, off ARD (German public TV, Channel One).....the news folks will run a special entitled "Stat. Land. Wandel."

The series will attempt to explain the changing landscape of Germans, their home-lifestyles, and the future of urban and rural living. 

Is there a transition going on?  My suggestion would be that since the 1950s....there's been a continual transition and it's never really stopped.  In a sense.....urban and rural evolution taking place on the same spectrum.

You can walk around Frankfurt or Mainz in 1978....get a sense of urban lifestyles....come back in the 1990s and find things still evolving.  Even now....2021....lifestyles of living continue to evolve.  

You can make the statement that urbanization is screwing up the perception of highly urbanized areas.  People ask the question....why can't I move twenty to forty kilometers beyond the city, and get some 'peace'?  

Crime part of this continual trend?  To some degree.  But you have Germans with a mindset that life could involve less stress, and some town of 20,000 would be a lot more appealing than Frankfurt or Mainz. 

This trend going on in Dusseldorf, Stuttgart, Berlin and Hamburg?  Yes.

You see a trend on the outskirts of Berlin now.....where faster rail connections have been constructed....you could find a fairly rural village of 3,000 who finally got themselves a rapid-rail connection to the inner circle of Berlin.....so you find more people interested in buying property or purchasing an older house for renovation purposes.  

This attempt by ARD?  They basically want to tell the story, which Germans know most of the basic details but have never really thought much about why the evolution is taking place.  

Adding to this....if you look at Green Party 'chatter'.....there's a fair amount of hype going on...to convince politicians to throw more money into inner-city development (yeah, it makes little sense if people are exiting the bigger cities).