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.
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.
This paper explores negotiations of futures within and beyond Germany's formerly fastest shrinking city, the East German city of Hoyerswerda. Originally built for the German Democratic Republic's ...miners and energy workers, its model socialist New City attracted tens of thousands of people in the latter half of the 20th century. In the wake of German reunification, this direction of mobility reversed. Economic transformations resulted in widespread unemployment and subsequent outmigration. Mostly the young and well-educated left the city, as reunified Germany saw millions of East Germans move 'to the West'. Beyond outmigration, those staying behind continued to face their city's presumed loss of the future. However, widespread expectations of better futures elsewhere did not necessarily result in ever more people leaving. Futures elsewhere were contrasted to futures elsewhen: hopeful local futures different to the one of continuous decline so commonly predicted. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, I explore these entangled practices of place- and future-making and map the different expectations of im/mobility that make up a surprisingly complex local regime of im/mobility. I do so in order to ascertain what keeps peripheral postindustrial cities like Hoyerswerda going amidst accelerated urban decline and ubiquitous outmigration.
When accounting for changes in the post-socialist era, anthropologists were forced to carefully distinguish between what had remained the same, what had actually changed and what was emerging anew ...and on its own terms. As a sub-discipline, the anthropology of post-socialism has thereby contributed prominently to theories of time, change and temporal agency. It has also shown that the post-socialist present is, if at all, as determined by its socialist past as it is by its insecure futures. Based on a few ethnographic examples from a former socialist model city in East Germany, and my own experiences as both a post-socialist anthropologist and an anthropologist of post-socialism, I scrutinize the temporal logic of the sub-discipline’s defining concept. I do so by testing its applicability to three objects of anthropological inquiry, and by pondering upon its implications for a more sustained study of the future. The temporal multiplicity that this concept affords, I claim, is crucial for the discipline overall, but demands further scrutiny. Rather than abandoning it, as I and others have previously argued, it is time to rewrite the time of post-socialism with regards to the future.
Over the last 30 years, the inhabitants of Hoyerswerda, the German Democratic Republic's second socialist model city, have struggled through de-industrialisation, unemployment, outmigration and urban ...decay. With the help of Karl Polanyi's concept of 'countermovement', this essay scrutinises their various critiques of contemporary forms of capitalism. I investigate how these critiques help them to navigate their hometown's prospects in the postindustrial era in order to rethink more generally the temporal implications of the social sciences' conceptualisations of postsocialist critique. I approach my interlocutors' expressions of discomfort amidst current political and economic crises as complex negotiations of the postindustrial present that are not determined by their socialist past.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
With the help of ethnographic material from Germany’s fastest shrinking city, I critically engage in this paper with the term ‘temporality’. By bringing together recent insights from the anthropology ...of time and the future, the literature on post-socialism, and contemporary philosophical debates on the problem of presentism, I pursue a thorough re-conceptualization of time as a matter of knowledge practices. I thereby question the idea of temporality as an inherent quality of anthropology’s objects of inquiry. Beyond temporality, I urge for abandoning such temporal attributions altogether whilst scrutinizing the temporal underpinnings of our own theories and analytics, as manifested in the term post-socialism. I claim that if anthropologists, and other social scientists, want to avoid determinists’ fallacies they should acknowledge that there is, indeed, no need for temporality in their analyses.
This paper investigates the impact of recent politico-economic changes on contemporary experiences of time from the perspective of the future. By discussing endurance, permanence, and sustainability ...in Germany's fastest-shrinking city, I present a set of future-orientated practices which are post-industrial, but unexpectedly so: namely, hopeful and not subject to the widely attested phenomenon of 'enforced presentism'. I subsequently position the temporal logics of endurance and sustainability against current academic responses to accelerated change, captured in the misleading uses of the Deleuzian concepts of emergence and becoming. My informants' epistemic investments in the future allow for a different understanding of what I describe as post-industrial temporal agency and the conflictive politics that shape these otherwise unexpected temporal relations. Le présent article étudie l'impact des changements politico-économiques récents sur l'expérience contemporaine du temps, du point de vue du futur. En discutant de l'endurance, de la permanence et de la durabilité dans la ville d'Allemagne qui rapetisse le plus vite, l'auteur présente un ensemble de pratiques orientées vers le futur qui s'avèrent postindustrielles d'une façon inattendue : pleines d'espoir et ne participant pas du phénomène largement attesté de « présentéisme forcé ». Il situe ensuite la logique temporelle d'endurance et de durabilité à l'opposé des réponses académiques actuelles aux changements accélérés, telles qu'elles sont révélées dans l'usage trompeur des concepts deleuziens d'émergence et de devenir. Les investissements épistémiques de ses informateurs dans le futur jettent un éclairage différent sur ce qu'il décrit comme une agencéité temporelle postindustrielle et sur les politiques conflictuelles qui donnent formes à ces relations temporelles inattendues.
The Goetheviertel is the poorest district of Germany’s poorest city, the postindustrial harbour city of Bremerhaven. However, for many local inhabitants it is also the city’s most beautiful district ...with its 19th century architecture and central location, and any visitor of Bremerhaven would agree: this district is ripe for gentrification. Gentrification has been anticipated for the district at least since the 1980s when the city declared the Goetheviertel to be an investment area. Investors from all over the world bought property in the district, but, as many inhabitants underline today, they never really invested into the maintenance of their houses. The results are postindustrial ruins of a special kind: ruins of pre-gentrification. These ruins are former apartment houses whose ongoing decay materialises not just the general postindustrial decline of Bremerhaven, but results from the continued failure of the realization of gentrification. They are ruins of failed anticipation. As many of the people living in the district, these houses might still await a better future, but, statically speaking, time has run out for them. Their deterioration has deemed them scrap (‘Schrott’-) houses that are legally uninhabitable. They epitomize the standstill in urban renovation that dominates both district and city. However, this absence also produces spaces for those that are usually excluded from a gentrified future. The scrap houses’ material qualities therefore maintain the current district inhabitants’ local futures by delaying the gentrification everybody continues to foresee. This article maps their temporal agency in order to scrutinize social sciences approaches to the production of time. Whilst discussing recent contributions to the anthropological literature on time and infrastructure, I present these houses with their specific material properties as active partners in the co-production of time in this particular district, and its potential futures.
This theoretical introduction develops a conceptual argument stemming from the concept of 'time-tricking'. Whilst most theories of time in anthropology develop a coherent definition of the nature of ...time – for instance, as 'cyclical' or 'linear' – I draw attention to a seemingly common metaphysical distinction in our temporal ontologies, that between the past and the future. This distinction allows me to do two things: first, I present two different versions of time-tricking, one focusing on references to time and particularly to the past, the other conceptualizing effects on the future; and then, second, I present the future as the main object of temporal agency. By developing the notion of 'future-tricking', I point to a specific kind of temporal agency which is based on metaphysical commitments heavily embedded in the present in politics, interests and possibilities.
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