A benchmark study in the changing field of urban anthropology, Berlin, Alexanderplatz is an ethnographic examination of the rapid transformation of the unified Berlin. Through a captivating account of the controversy around this symbolic public square in East Berlin, the book raises acute questions about expertise, citizenship, government and belonging. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the city administration bureaus, developers’ offices, citizen groups and in Alexanderplatz itself, the author advances a richly innovative analysis of the multiplicity of place. She reveals how Alexanderplatz is assembled through the encounters between planners, citizen activists, social workers, artists and ordinary Berliners, in processes of popular participation and personal narratives, in plans, timetables, documents and files, and in the distribution of pipes, tram tracks and street lights. Alexanderplatz emerges as a socialist spatial exemplar, a ‘future’ under construction, an object of grievance, and a vision of robust public space. This book is both a critical contribution to the anthropology of contemporary modernity and a radical intervention in current cross-disciplinary debates on the city.
Table of Content
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Glossary and Acronyms
Chapter I: Introduction
Where?
Berlin (in) Alexanderplatz
Inventing East and West Anthropologies of the City
Anthropology’s Objects
Chapter II: Constructing a Future Berlin
Suspect Debates
The Capital Topographies of Immorality
The European City Solids and Voids
Emptiness
Chapter III: The Disintegration of a Socialist Exemplar
Diagnosing the ‘Weak Heart of the City’
Inversions of Sociality
Failures of Government
A Dangerous Place?
A Problem of ‘the Social’
Producing Disorder
Chapter IV: Promising Plans
On (Not) Planning
Assembling Alexanderplatz
Premises and Promises
New Hybrids, Old Ambivalences
Postponing Failure
Chapter V: The Object of Grievance
A Time of Citizens
Citizens Summoned
Citizens Made
Governing Perceptions
Legitimate Concerns
A Citizenly Engagement with Place
Chapter VI: A Robust Square
The Place of Young People
Networking
Alexanderplatz Potentialities
Experts and Citizens Revisited
Perspectival Disparities
The Universal, the Particular and the Robust
Chapter VII: In Conclusion, Whose Alexanderplatz?
Bibliography
About the author
Gisa Weszkalnys studied in Berlin and Cambridge and received her Ph D in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. She is a Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Exeter and is conducting new research on oil developments in West Africa.
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