Social science analyses prove that 'community sports' has been a differentiated field of politics for several decades. Consequently, independent administrative units with a specialized staff are present as well as special political and parliamentary bodies. Moreover, this administrative and political area has a considerable and continuous share of the public budget. Local policies of sport, namely the communal planning of sports development, however, are confronted with complex problems:

• Due to societal processes of differentiation and individualization, there is a rather confusingly complex panorama of sports.
• The majority of the more than 100,000 major local sports facilities are outdated, for they were built more than 25 years ago. The need for renovation of these facilities is tremendously high, both in the old and new federal states of Germany. Current reliable calculations of the DOSB (German Olympic Sports Confederation) have estimated the cost of such renovations to be about 40 billion Euros.
• The federal and municipal departments of Vital Statistics reliably predict the decrease of the younger and middle age groups by a fifth in about 20 years. In the near future, this development results in a lack of a substantial part of current sports facilities' users.

Due to the present complexity of decision-making, the associations of German sports as well as political-administrative authorities need to organize their planning and administrative actions according to a solid data basis. The efforts of the research center, moreover, are based on the premise that those planning instruments, which have been used up to the present, no longer suffice for modern developments. They have to be fundamentally changed as this innovative process requires scientific grounding. Paramount to this field of research is the methodical development and expansion of sports attitude surveys as well as the critical review of the "Guide for the Development Planning of Sports Facilities" which has been passed by the federal government, the states, municipalities, and the German Sports Federation in 2000.