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So far, it is easy to understand that the city has been the real job generator, and not only in modern times. Job differentiation also meant status differentiation as a dynamic process. Since a new phase of city growth started in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century, gaining unprecedented speed in the 1890s, urban social structure has been reshaped several times, to the point where in the end a certain type of structure is no longer discernible. In a first phase, during which the old town elites managed to survive thanks to electoral privilege, the work place and the new kinds of market organization tended to dominate social structure and urban space,22 so that social segregation became the norm.

As a secular process, it was interrupted only by post-war social conditions, including vigorous migration. De-familiarization of urban life has many different meanings. It has meant, first of all, de-functionalization of the family in the light of progressive urban division of labour. Work separated from the family setting, and basic domestic tasks, such as those relating to consumption and waste, became organized increasingly by an urban service society. Networks formerly constituted by family relations became replaced by rather anonymous supra-familial voluntary organizations, which to a degree, and during further development, were absorbed by city intervention especially in the realm of social policy.

8. 37 a huge bibliography, the Bibliographie zur deutschen historischen Städteforschung, ed. , Cologne and Weimar, Parts 1 and 2: 1986, 1996 (with an additional index volume), part 3 in preparation, must be mentioned. Apart from the well-known Journal of Urban History, information on the progress of German writing on urban history may be obtained from several journals, such as: Die alte Stadt. , and especially: Informationen zur modernen Stadtgeschichte, 1970—. A few examples, dealing with post-war urban history, are Klaus von Beyme, Der Wiederaufbau.