Fe4KB is an innovative project of the IF-Bund framework agreement to exploit new remote sensing methodologies in the federal administration. It is based on the results of the IF-Bund innovation project FE4ErSiGG. The project will run from January to December 2023 and is being carried out together with the Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB) and the Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development (BBSR).
The goal of the FE4KB project is to analyse small-scale population development in Germany since 2011 in order to identify trends of urbanisation and suburbanisation using a combination of demographic data and new, high spatial resolution data sets on settlement structures. The data sets that compartmentalise settlement patterns are independent of official administrative units and derived using an optimised FE4ErSiGG approach based on the morphological characteristics of settlement structures. This makes it possible to analyse population development for the first time on a fully new, up-to-now unavailable spatial and semantic detail level. The results should for the first time supply a spatially differentiated indication of population development and structures in urban and rural regions. With the new subdivisions of the settlement landscape the population can be quantified in those regions that so far could not be unambiguously identified as urban or rural in conventional differentiations. This includes many suburban regions that in recent years have experienced noticeable population growth due to an increased exodus from large cities. The FE4KB project thus offers a high potential for small-scale analysis of population development in the context of current tendencies toward suburbanisation in Germany.