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Increasing socio-spatial inequalities in Europe have led to a revival of the term “peripheralization” in urban and regional research. In this context, peripheralization is often seen as an outcome of powerlessness. It is stated that peripheralized actors are lacking the capacities to influence decisions or are excluded from decision-making networks. This paper contributes to the understanding of the relationship between peripheralization and power by empirically testing if the notion of “powerless” peripheries holds true in the light of established theories on local power. Therefore, we refer to the Community Power Debate, especially to concepts known as the “three faces of power” and the distinction between “power over” and “power to”, which were brought forward by Urban Regime theories. We discuss two empirical cases in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, and demonstrate that peripheralization here cannot be regarded as the outcome of an intended disadvantage facilitated by powerful elites (“power over”). Rather, we highlight a number of structural constraints, which decisively limit the capacity to act and the scope for local decision-making (“power to”). We conclude that future research should overcome a perspective on peripheries as exclusively being dominated and disadvantaged by the centres and focus on the lack of resources that hinders peripheries to have a more sustained influence in political decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For decades, public and scholarly debates on large, post-war housing estates in western Europe have been concerned with social decline. After 1989/1990, the point in time of fundamental societal change in eastern Europe, this concern was transferred to estates in post-socialist cities. However, empirical evidence for a general negative trend has not emerged. Recent publications confirm the persistence of social mix and highlight the differentiated trajectories of estates. This paper aims to contribute to an approach of how to conceptually make sense of these differentiated trajectories. Using data from a unique longitudinal survey in East Germany, starting in 1979, we investigate the state of social mix, drivers of social change and the inner differentiation in the housing estate Leipzig-Grünau. We found no proof for a dramatic social decline, rather there is evidence for a slow and multi-faceted change in the social and demographic structure of the residents contributing to a gradual social fragmentation of the estate. This is a result of path dependencies, strategic planning effects and ownership structures. We discuss these drivers of large housing estate trajectories and their related impacts by adapting a framework of multiple, overlapping institutional, social and urban post-socialist transformations. We suggest embedding the framework in a wider and a local context in which transformations need to be seen. In conclusion, we argue for a theoretical debate that makes sense of contextual differences within such transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there has been growing concern among analysts of German politics and society over the last 10 years about the persistence of a 'cultural', 'social' or 'psychological' divide between (former) east and west Germany, most current research in this field shies away from a thorough investigation of the complex networks of socio-material, historical and spatial relations that contribute to the construction of social identities. Few studies exist on the impact of media representations and on the differential way in which many of the latter portray east and west Germans, while even less attention has been paid to people's own interpretations and their capacity to negotiate between media representations and other social experiences in the process of identity formation. In this paper I begin to address these issues by focusing on the interlinkages between (former) east and west German interviewees' understanding of their 'place' in the unified nation and the interpretations they construct of representations in the televised media. My aim is to show both the significant role which images play in the formation of marginalized v. centred social positions and identities, and the way in which viewers' embodiment in complex networks of social relations helps to reiterate as well as to contradict the meanings that they find constructed in media representations. The point of this paper is not to determine whether binary definitions of east and west German identities are 'true' or 'false', but how effective they are and on what basis they can be contested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]