The City as World-Place: Transterritorial Flows and Territorial Order in a Nuremberg Neighbourhood

Christian Berndt and Marc Boeckler
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Christian Berndt: Institut für Humangeographie, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Robert-Mayer-Strasse 6-8, 60325 Frankfurt/Main, Germany
Marc Boeckler: Lehrstuhl für Kulturgeographie, Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Ostenstrasse 18, 85072 Eichstätt, Germany

Environment and Planning A, 2007, vol. 39, issue 7, 1545-1563

Abstract: Approaching struggles for political representation through a perspective of ‘methodological transterritorialism’, we seek to make sense of recent developments evolving around a territorialised urban neighbourhood. Werderau, a garden suburb founded by a mechanical engineering company at the beginning of the 20th century, enjoyed relative protection from globalising frictions and struggles until the ‘world-in-motion’ suddenly penetrated the community a few years ago. We begin by charting the production of the bounded settlement as a site of alternate social ordering at a time of hyper-industrialisation and its imaginary role as a territorial heterotopia, symbolising order in a seemingly chaotic urban world. Turning to the owner's decision to sell the neighbourhood in 1998, we then argue that long-term inhabitants discursively frame the events following the decision as ‘transterritorial pollution’ of their bounded community, reflected in the commodification of their neighbourhood and in an ‘invasion’ of non-German home-owners. After discussing how longer term residents attempt to restabilise their identities by taking up a xenophobic discourse, we conclude by criticising policymakers for responding solely in a territorial logic and for one-sidedly taking up the discourse advanced by long-term residents. Instead, we advance a utopian vision of the city as a worldly site where people live under conditions of ‘transcultural Gleich-Gültigkeit ’ in the double meaning of the German term: understood as being ‘indifferent’ towards the proximate other as well as referring to equality and equal rights.

Date: 2007
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envira:v:39:y:2007:i:7:p:1545-1563

DOI: 10.1068/a38484

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