Enlarge image
Children's playground in Berlin (archive image)
Photo: Jˆrg Carstensen / picture alliance / dpa
Children in the poorer districts of major German cities have less playground space per person than their peers in privileged neighborhoods.
In western Germany in particular, they are also exposed to much more noise than children in more affluent areas.
This is the result of an as yet unpublished study by the Berlin Science Center for Social Research (WZB) for the German Children's Fund and the Heinrich Böll Foundation.
It is available to SPIEGEL.
For the study entitled "One City - Separate Worlds?" The researchers evaluated data from Berlin, Dortmund, Erfurt, Hamburg, Leipzig, Nuremberg and Saarbrücken.
more on the subject
Generation Corona in Germany: What the pandemic is doing to our children - and what helps them
They checked whether children grow up in poorer and richer parts of the city with a comparably good infrastructure.
"Child poverty is usually not a feature of individual city districts, but often extends across neighboring districts," the evaluation says.
In the study, the research team compared access to cultural offerings such as libraries, playgrounds and natural areas, traffic safety and noise pollution.
The main results:
Poverty is often concentrated in certain areas: with the exception of Nuremberg, there are neighborhoods in all of the cities examined in which more than half of the children under the age of 15 live on Hartz IV.
The highest concentration of poverty was found in districts of Hamburg (up to 79 percent of children receiving social benefits) and Berlin (77 percent).
With the exception of Hamburg, children in the districts with the lowest Hartz IV rate in all the cities examined had significantly more playground space per capita than children in the poorest areas.
The gap is largest in Berlin, with a good five square meters of playground space per child in the poorest areas and more than 18 square meters in the richest.
"The greatest disadvantage of children in segregated city districts lies in the increased environmental pollution," write the researchers.
There are clear differences between West and East: In the major West German cities, there are often extensive industrial and commercial areas in and around the poorer parts of the city with significantly increased noise pollution, sometimes even at night.
"In Erfurt, Leipzig and East Berlin, on the other hand, child poverty is concentrated in the large housing estates built using prefabricated panels," the study says.
There is no increased industrial or noise pollution here.
The WZB researchers also examined whether poorer and richer parts of the city differ in terms of their important facilities.
In secondary schools, pediatricians' practices and cultural institutions, however, no connection with the social situation can be proven in any of the seven cities, according to the study.
The study
Expand Who created the study?
The study was carried out by Katja Salomo and Marcel Helbig, who at the Science Center Berlin (WZB) deal with educational processes and issues of social inequality.
The study was commissioned by the German Children's Fund and the Heinrich Böll Foundation.
AreaWhat was examined? Expand
The researchers examined seven large cities with a population of around 200,000 or more.
The locations were chosen to cover different regions of Germany.
In addition, usable data had to be available showing how environmental conditions, buildings and infrastructural facilities are distributed over a small area and how these characteristics are related to the social situation of the neighborhoods in these cities.
Area How meaningful are the results? Expand
The study is not a representative survey, but a case study in which the greatest possible diversity of the cities examined was taken into account.
For example, the distribution of pediatrician practices is "very homogeneous in all cities examined".
In contrast, however, there are massive differences among child and youth therapists: "They are often concentrated in the center of cities and are also more likely to be found in the more socially privileged parts of the city."
him / dpa