The dynamics of socio-spatial migration and concentration processes within cities and regions increasingly pose great challenges for local administrations. Timely political and planning responses to new developments in areas such as school planning, commuter traffic or new residential areas requires detailed knowledge of mobility and migration patterns. Nevertheless, administrations are often facing a lack of resources, capacities and experience for analysing the mass of statistical data and for integrating it into sustainable political and planning decision-making. This is where the hin&weg analytical visualisation tool can provide essential support for city statisticians, urban planners and urban researchers. It helps analyse and visualise data from official statistics on inner-city relocation, urban-rural migration and commuter patterns.

Older versions of hin&weg have been available for visualising statistical migration data at the click of a button already since 2004. In the current project phase, until May 2022, the software is redeveloped by the IfL together with pilot municipalities, the software developer Delphi IMM and the German Institute of Urban Affairs (Difu) as a simple toolkit and extended for new user groups in administrations and the wider public. With the latest generation of hin&weg, population movements can be analysed and visualised quickly and precisely for different spatial levels and over time series.

The participatory software development process, currently involving 18 municipal administrations, allows relevant software functions to be defined and, at the same time, possible obstacles for practical use to be identified and removed in order to make hin&weg as user-friendly as possible. The hin&weg software will be made available not just to local administrations, but also to actors from the civil society and from academia. Citizens will be able to use hin&weg then for their own evaluations, for example to better understand changes in population movements in their own neighbourhood or home region.

Results/Publications

A first test version (alpha-version) of hin&weg was made available to the pilot municipalities participating in the project in August 2019. In November 2019, the participating city statisticians and urban planners met with the project team in Leipzig to discuss their user experiences and to set priorities for the development of the beta-version, based on their suggestions. The beta-testing has begun in June 2020 in direct exchange with 18 pilot municipalities. In April 2021, the participatory software development was completed with the fourth project workshop. The resulting final beta version was handed over to the pilot municipalities in December 2021. The goals for the remaining course of the project include further optimising the user interface and existing functions of the software, broadening the offer of instruction materials, and expanding the user group to include additional municipalities, as well as actors from civil society and from academia.

Dunkl, Anna / Moldovan, Aura /  Leibert, Tim (2019): Innerstädtische Umzugsmuster ausländischer Staatsangehöriger in Leipzig: Ankunftsquartiere in Ostdeutschland?. In: Stadtforschung und Statistik: Zeitschrift des Verbandes Deutscher Städtestatistiker, 32(2), S. 60–68. https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-64116-4

Dunkl, Anna / Moldovan, Aura /  Leibert, Tim (2020): Innerstädtische Umzugsmuster ausländischer Staatsangehöriger in Leipzig. In: Statistischer Quartalsbericht, 2019(4), S. 4–10. https://www.leipzig.de/fileadmin/mediendatenbank/leipzig-de/Stadt/02.1_Dez1_Allgemeine_Verwaltung/12_Statistik_und_Wahlen/Statistik/Statistischer_Quartalsbericht_Leipzig_2019_4.pdf