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This book offers an invaluable study on class composition in Leipzig, the city renowned for its pivotal role in the downfall of state socialism. It describes how class changes with the city s neoliberal restructuring, that has at its core the commodification and financialization of the spaces people inhabit. Through an ethnographic lens it illustrates how the city's transformation alienates its inhabitants and generates fragmentations between them, hindering their collective appropriation of their city, neighbourhoods and homes. Their different experiences of uneven development divide them despite similar concerns of rising rents. Interplaying with the local history of shrinkage, deindustrialization and austerity, the overall alienation feeds into collective lethargic depressive moods that permeates also institutions of the local administration, leaving them reluctant to intervene with the confident actions of investors and growth-oriented politicians. A few exceptionally stubborn small urban movements generate islands in this sea of decomposition, they do however not suffice to halt the fast pace of restructuring. The book contributes to political urban class analyses by combining the study of subjectivation in uneven development with an affect-sensitive scrutiny of tenant power and its limits vis-à-vis a financializing housing market and an austerity ridden local state.
List of contents
chapter1:Introduction.- Chapter2:Studying class in neoliberal urbanization.- chapter3:Leipzig an East German exception Studying a strategic locational pick.- chapter4:Belonging and class stratification subjectivation in a restructuring neighbourhood.- chapter5:Between struggle and authoritarianism solidarities and class fragmentation in neoliberal urbanization.- chapter6:Not pushing the state how collective depression reproduces neoliberal urbanism.- chapter7:Conclusions and outlook.
About the author
The interest in urban politics and class composition has accompanied Leon Rosa Reichle through their academic and non-academic work. During their studies in sociology, politics and philosophy in Leipzig, Grenoble, and Jena, and during their PhD at the Centre for Urban Research in Austerity in Leicester and Berkeley Geography, Leon has met and worked with a range of urban and feminist groups, movements and projects. In their recent work, Leon studied local state responses to racism, trying to figure out how to better challenge institutionalized marginalization. They have published articles on social reproduction, solidarity initiatives, authoritarianism and what it means for organizing, ethnographic research and its challenges, uneven development, institutional racism and different other aspects of state theory.
