Back to the Postindustrial Future
Subtitle: An Ethnography of Germany's Fastest-Shrinking City
Publisher: Berghahn Books, Incorporated
Published: 2018
Language: eng
Number of pages: 219
ISBN-13: 9781785337987
Subjects: Cities and towns, germany; Germany, social conditions; Germany, economic conditions
Description: How does an urban community come to terms with the loss of its future? The former socialist model city of Hoyerswerda is an extreme case of a declining postindustrial city. Built to serve the GDR coal industry, it lost over half its population to outmigration after German reunification and the coal industry crisis, leading to the large-scale deconstruction of its cityscape. This book tells the story of its inhabitants, now forced to reconsider their futures. Building on recent theoretical work, it advances a new anthropological approach to time, allowing us to investigate the postindustrial era and the futures it has supposedly lost.