Database with International Projects by German Construction Companies Goes Online

A Research Group at the IRS has examined the international activities of German construction companies in the 20th century. An important result of this research has now been published: a database that allows detailed research into offshore construction projects by German companies.

The database of the Research Group "Histories of the Built Environment" went online at the end of August 2024. The database includes over 1,300 construction projects in the Global South that were built with the participation of German construction companies in the "long 20th century" - that is, the period between 1870 and 2010. The database is accessible via a public online platform. This enables both temporal and geographical visualisations. Thus the globalisation of the construction industry is made visible.

The development of the database was an important part of the project "Conquering (with) Concrete. German Construction Companies as Global Players in Local Contexts", which was funded by the VolkswagenFoundation's Freigeist programme. The project examined the globalisation of construction and used German construction companies, specifically their foreign projects, as an entry point. The project team researched the spatial, temporal and technical aspects of the construction projects, as well as the respective partners involved. In addition to the construction companies themselves, these included subcontractors, suppliers, banks, governments, other (local) construction companies and others. From this data, the team created a database capable of establishing connections between the data points. It served as an important research tool, for example, by allowing the researchers to identify particularly interesting places for in-depth case studies. The publication of the database is intended to make these possibilities available to external researchers and the interested public.

The database has been created over the entire duration of the third-party funded project since 2020 by project leader Monika Motylińska and project staff members María Jeldes, Paul Sprute and Anastasia Betsa.