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The global competition for highly-skilled professionals and their knowledge has grown over the past decades. Cities have increasingly become aware of the importance of highly-skilled labour for their future development. The aim of our paper is to analyse urban policies towards highly-skilled migrants. Our paper is based on empirical research in three German university cities, Aachen, Bonn and Cologne. Our results emphasize that there is a growing awareness of local policy-makers concerning this topic. We found that the cities made efforts to create a welcoming culture in order to attract and retain highly-skilled migrants. However, there are differences between our cities regarding their approaches to attract highly-skilled migrants.

The high number of asylum seekers who immigrated to Germany in 2015 and 2016 is supposed to be one of the key challenges for social cohesion in the years to come. While initially the most pressing tasks such as providing emergency shelters, housing supply and registration had to be managed, the long-term integration of recognised refugees is currently a major topic of discussion. The relocation of asylum seekers out of group accommodation into the housing market is said to be a central precondition for integration. Simultaneously, providing individual apartments for refugees has proven to be a tremendous challenge for many municipalities, especially in highly populated urban areas, since it puts additional pressure on tight housing markets. This competition for affordable housing can (further) evoke social tension in these regions. In this chapter, we will examine the local responses to these developments by comparing two case study areas in North Rhine-Westphalia. The selection of different local contexts provides a comparative insight into the structural conditions of integration processes in urban contexts of different sizes. We will explore different housing strategies for refugees in the large city of Cologne and in small and medium-sized towns in the district of Heinsberg. The chapter illustrates the difficulties of implementing these strategies and identifies several implementation gaps.

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Zusammenfassung Einzelhandel findet heute nicht nur in den Stadt- und Stadtteilzentren bzw. in den Einkaufszentren am Rande der Städte statt, sondern zunehmend auch im Internet. Der Beitrag untersucht, welche Determinanten ausschlaggebend sind, im stationären Einzelhandel bzw. im Online-Handel einzukaufen. Die Ergebnisse basieren auf einer Befragung von rund 2.900 Personen in den sechs nordrhein-westfälischen Stadtregionen Aachen, Bochum, Bonn, Dortmund, Münster und Köln. In Abhängigkeit der Entfernung zur jeweiligen Innenstadt wurde in insgesamt 26 Untersuchungsgebieten befragt. In allen sechs Stadtregionen zeigt sich, dass nicht die räumlichen, sondern ausgewählte demographische und sozioökonomische Faktoren das Einkaufsverhalten bestimmen. Das Geschlecht, das Alter und die Lebensstile spielen beim Online-Einkauf eine wesentliche Rolle, das Einkommen ist keine beeinflussende Größe.