Krieg als externer Schock oder Katalysator für neue Pfade. Zum Verhältnis von Krieg und Pfadabhängigkeit in deutschen Städten des 20. Jahrhunderts

Abstract

The paper starts with some preliminary reflections on the significance and efficacy of a range of factors for creating path dependencies. These factors comprise geography, networked infrastructures, politics, and territorial changes to borders and frontiers, economic dominance and hegemony of certain industries, and socio-cultural profile or ‘image’ of a city. In the second part the paper exemplifies the crucial role of timing for the success or failure of deliberate and planned attempts by city administrations to embark on a new course of urban development. In the case of Darmstadt, the capital of the land of Hesse, the energetic PR-initiative by the city administration to attract ‘creative industries’ and to complement the hitherto pursued strategy of ‘Pensionopolis’ by modern, non-polluting industries, failed since it was overshadowed by the outbreak of World War One, which tended to immobilise company sites. A short comparison to Mannheim, which successfully transformed its economic structure from entrepôt to industrial city by means of an industrial port completed by 1900, underscores the crucial role of timing in such attempts to change path dependencies. In the long-term perspective, the paper shows how some initial targets of Darmstadt city marketing 1914 eventually were taken up again and realised by a major urban development project in the 1990s, answering to deindustrialisation processes of the 1980s and 1990s.