Struggling to Belong: Class, Alienation and The Politics of Neoliberal Restructuring in Leipzig

By: Leon Rosa Reichle

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Synopsis: 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.