Facts Sangerhausen

Selected Key Data

Population

The economic transformation that set in from 1990 onwards with the end of mining came with dramatic consequences for Sangerhausen. In addition to unemployment where the rates of over 25 percent were significantly higher than the state average, the city was increasingly hit by the migration of young and well-qualified inhabitants. Although Sangerhausen had 33,000 registered inhabitants in 1990, there were only 25,400 left in 2000 and around 21,700 in 2008.

Municipal Boundaries

Because of increased suburbanisation from the early 1990s, the cities have lost a considerable proportion of their inhabitants and tax revenues to the surrounding communities. In order to dilute the impact of these losses, a gradual process of incorporation has increased the municipal areas in size, sometimes significantly so.

The coloured shape on the map symbolises the expansion of the city in 1990, the outer line shows the boarder of the municipal area of 2010.

Housing Situation

During the nineteen nineties, the city focussed special attention on the preservation and redevelopment of the historical building assets in Sangerhausen Old Town. From 1993, parts of the Old Town were gentrified in an exemplary fashion using urban redevelopment funds drawn from the Urban Redevelopment Listed Monuments and Urban Development programmes. Conversely, vacancies continued to rise in the housing estates.
In the whole city, over 1,800 of the approximately 14,000 housing units in the city were empty at the end of 1999. Whereas the main focus at the start was on coordinating the demolition work in the residential estates, subsequent stages saw mutual coordination of gentrification measures.

Housing Situation in Sangerhausen (Stand 2/2010):
Housing Stock: 12.400
Surplus Housing: 1.400 / 11 Percent 
Housing Demolitian since 2001/02: 2.100

Industry

The economic transformation that set in from 1990 onwards with the end of mining came with dramatic consequences for Sangerhausen. The rates of unemployment where over 25 percent and significantly higher than the state average. The diagram illustrates the radical economic structural reform: Large industrial combines were forced to close, and even where smaller companies came along and still produce today, the often significantly increased output figures require only a fraction of the workforce once needed.

Attempts undertaken by the city and the state government to preserve at least mechanical engineering in Sangerhausen were greeted with only partial success. Whereas the strongly traditional Mitteldeutsche Fahrradfabrik (MIFA) produces bicycles to this day, if albeit with significantly fewer employees, intermittent owners repeatedly led the machine factory MAFA into bankruptcy despite massive state support before it was finally shut down. Irrespective that the city and county of Sangerhausen were still among the GDR’s most important centres of industry in the nineteen eighties, they found themselves ten years later in the Mansfeld/South Harz region, one of Germany’s structurally impoverished areas on the border between Saxony-Anhalt and the Free State of Thuringia.

Relocating and Commuting

In the 1990s, suburbanisation affected all the IBA cities. At the same time, people, especially those from the former industrial centres, began to move to West Germany. The populations of the large cities of Halle (Saale) and Magdeburg have increased minimally in recent times, mainly due to migration from Saxony-Anhalt. In the meantime, the improved transportation network allows for longer journeys to and from work and the number of commuters is climbing.

The interactive tool "Relocating and commuting" visualises this range of topics for all IBA cities.

Leibniz-Institut für Länderkunde (IfL), Leipzig 2010 Data: Günter Herfert, design/programming: Sebastian Specht

Sources for statistics quoted on this and the following pages: Ministry of Regional Development and Transport Saxony-Anhalt; Raumbeobachtungssystem Sachsen-Anhalt (RABE); Statistisches Landesamt Sachsen-Anhalt; Urban Development Concept Sangerhausen 2003 and 2004; Urban Development Concept Sangerhausen 2007; 1989 GDR statistics; www.iba-monitor.de; Status 11/2009