ABSTRACT
The influx of guestworkers into West Germany since the end of the 1950s forms part of a wider transference of labour from the backward regions of southeastern and Mediterranean Europe to the industrial countries of northwest Europe. The crucial interface between guestworkers and their hosts exists within the geographic context of cities. J. Leib and G. Mertins have criticised the emphasis on diffusion, pointing in particular to the geographical stability of the spatial distribution of Spanish guestworkers at successive dates between 1961 and 1976. Guestworkers in West German cities are concentrated mainly in the inner residential areas, where housing is older and the environment is most deficient in those qualities of openness, greenery and quietude that are eagerly sought by contemporary urban dwellers. This chapter shows the spatial distribution of Nuremberg's foreign population in 1979. Contemporary West Germany contains a diverse foreign population which differs in important respects from that at the peak of immigration in the early 1970s.
