Shrinking Cities

Standpoint 01 / September 2003

Walter Prigge---------------------------------------------------------------------------MENTALITIES AND CULTURAL TRANSFORMATION
The first approach to an international comparison of the paths by whichcities shrink diagnoses varying mentalities and cultures of societal transformation, which partially overlap in eastern Germany.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------Vital/open: Russia/transformation
The transformation of society in Russia is a chaotic transition: The formalistic order of the communist system rapidly collapsed, leading to chaosand poverty in which now each person is responsible for his own individual
survival – even if by planting food crops on empty urban spaces. The introduction of a state-capitalistically regulated market economy mobilizes individuals to undertake informal actions (in Moscow, for example, every car isa taxi) that compete with received forms of collectivism. Among the latterare not only socialist operations with hidden unemployment, but also renationalization as an element of a globalized construction of identity.
The planned economy of the USSR organized society’s life directly and without any filter; now, the globalized elements of industry, trade, and service
are also directly exposed to international competition, without the mediation of, for example, any urban civil society. This unstable collision
between formal continuities and informal beginnings provides no supporting
societal structures, but creates many open ends and thus releases many vital
individualities into risky dynamic modernization processes that are characterized by hard social differences.
Melancholy/withdrawn: eastern Germany/marginalization
The historical break in the former East Germany (GDR) was faster and, in its
short-term dynamics, harder. But it was cushioned by the transfer of overarching societal institutions and culture from the West, which organized theestablishment of the democratic order of a capitalistic market economy. The
latter’s principles had, however, already come to the surface in the GDR
through the erosion of the homogeneous normality of everyday life in the Gar’slabor-society long before the break – as its utopian elements. But therepublican revolt could not be carried through to the end; it vanished withthe ungrouped opportunity to carry out a historically possible reform of thesociety of the entire Federal Republic.
Instead, the fake normality of the GDR was converted to the formal normalityof the free market order – precisely at the moment in the 1990s when the latter’s structure was transforming in the crisis of de-industrialization andglobalization. This doubled transformation depresses the search for societal
reform alternatives and ratifies the “failure of the revolts” with their depressive processes of closing, in which many withdraw into local milieus of
peripheral marginality: vital openings were closed again, the open endsof the outbreak are trickling away in the sedated cultures of administered
unemployment, small garden plot pleasures, and shopping mall urbanity.
The ebb and flow of waiting: England/de-industrialization
The eastern German path of shrinking is thus confronted with marginalization
phenomena that have long been observable in England. The erosion of industrial cultures (extended workbenches in the processing industry with low-wage
sectors, lowered social standards, long-term unemployment, etc.) is increasingly overlaid with global practices (services, informationalization, new

-2-entrepreneurs, etc.), and this creates the normality of the self-contradictory post-industrial transformation in the perforated European city: smallscale dynamics of growth and shrinking in one and the same city, segregation,and social-spatial polarizations between endogenous and exogenous strategies
in which state subsidization and privatization, social climbing and disadvantaging, urban glitter and neighborhood decline lie in close proximity.
The post-proletarian cultures are characterized by a “waiting” individualization resulting from the dissolution and de-spatialization of homogeneous
milieus and social networks – only soccer, enthusiasm for technology, andpopular consumption of the media still recall the collective socialization
practices of the industrial mass culture.
Written off: USA/suburbanization
He who no longer finds employment becomes mobile, leaves the city, and starts
anew somewhere else. In the USA, the city is left behind: written off landscapes of ruins with abandoned property that is occasionally burned down.
Private urbanization in the USA gets along without urban consciousness(therein resembling the state-socialist “urbanization without any city”): inthe city in the USA, centrality is merely an economic advantage; if this islost, it is sought elsewhere.
The winner is always the surrounding region. The ratio between downtown andregional population, for example in the Detroit area, is 20 to 80. There,
against the background of the specifically American racism, suburbanization
creates homogeneous settlements on the edge of the city, with the rigid
regulations of gated communities or common interest developments, in which
the middle classes, fleeing the city, practice the family-centered model ofsociety: “American Beauty” between highway, swimming pool, and shopping mall.
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