Quote:
Originally Posted by New Brisavoine
The Rhine-Ruhr has a unique combination of the worst natural change and the biggest (as of 2014) net migration. It's the exact opposite of Paris.
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The Rhein-Ruhr isn't really a metro area. It's just a cluster of cities, with very different demographic trends. IMO it's hard to draw a larger conclusion because there are very different things happening in, say, Cologne, and happening in Bottrop.
Some cities in Rhein-Ruhr are still declining postindustrial places, others are very white collar and booming, others are somewhere in the middle. The Cologne-Bonn and Duesseldorf areas are too different culturally and economically to compare to the Ruhr, IMO.
I also suspect migration to Germany is somewhat more hyperconcentrated than in France. Yes, Paris obviously receives a huge bulk of migrants, but most French cities appear to have visible migrant populations. Germany's 10 or so largest "metros" have huge immigrant populations, but you see very few immigrants in former East Germany outside of Berlin, or really anywhere in rural/small town Germany.
I would say Stuttgart, Munich, Mannheim-Heidelberg, Nuremberg, Frankfurt, Cologne, Duesseldorf, Ruhrgebiet, Hamburg and Berlin are the cities with very large foreign populations. Basically only big cities in the center and south, and less so in the north and east. Mannheim feels much more "foreign" than somewhere like Bremen, and even Bremen feels much more "foreign" compared to Dresden.