Metropolitan regions as hybrid spaces: New socio-spatial inequalities through digitalization? A longitudinal analysis using the example of housing search processes in the Halle-Leipzig region

• Applicant: Dr. Karin Wiest
• Subject Area: Human Geography
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 542848051

Global developments, which are subsumed under the key term "digitalisation", affect current social structures in a variety of ways (Reckwitz 2017, Mau 2017, Nassehi 2019) and are also seen as drivers of urban-regional transformation processes. Against this background, this project assumes that, on the one hand, social differentiations in the course of the digital transformation of the labour market and, on the other hand, the effects of algorithmization and digital mediatization (including the use of social media platforms) in everyday life are creating new social and spatial orders in urban regions. Both development paths of neighborhood locations and spatial practices and imaginations of residents, which are shaped to varying degrees by virtual spatial experiences, are examined. It is assumed that patterns of socio-spatial differentiation are reflected not only in material-physical but also in virtual everyday spaces and are (re-)produced there. The project builds on empirical work from a previous project in which residential location decisions, neighborhood assessments and everyday activity patterns were analyzed in suburban, inter-urban and inner-city locations in the Halle-Leipzig region (including Danielzyk et al. 2014). A longitudinal comparison should make it possible to depict socio-spatial developments in the neighborhoods under investigation over a period of more than 10 years. The relationships between the socio-economic status of the residents, selected characteristics of the residential neighborhoods and the development of increasingly digital everyday practices will be analyzed. A typification of differentiated life situations and lifestyles based on this will help to empirically classify the thesis of the growing social significance of "digital elites" and "digital precarization" in terms of socio-spatial differentiation processes in the region. In a qualitatively orientated part of the study, the exchange about and the course of housing search processes will be documented in a diary-like manner on the basis of online communities. This should make it possible to directly record the interweaving of virtual and physical-material perceptions of space as well as changes in attitudes during the course of the search. Supplementary problem-centered interviews will explore how algorithmizations selectively influence spatial perceptions and how the different users of social media (re-)produce spatial imaginations themselves in their textual and visual communication. The aim is to gain insights into how differentiated "digital" lifestyles and increasingly virtual spatial experiences affect the perception and re-evaluation of residential locations in the urban region.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants