From One Transition to Another. Urban Shrinkage and Post-fossil Futures in Eastern Germany
Hélène Roth is lecturer at the University Clermont Auvergne, UMR Territoires, and associate member of UMR Géographie-cités. The defense will take place on
Tuesday, June 3
at 2:00 PM
Campus Condorcet
Bâtiment Recherche Sud Room 0.015,
5 cours des Humanités
Aubervilliers.
The habilitation (HDR) of Hélène Roth consists in three volumes:
- Volume 1 is a summary of her academic career.
- Volume 2 is an anthology of her research work, organised into four parts:
– Industrial restructuring and rural areas in Germany
– A geographical approach to poverty in Germany
– Urban decline and regeneration from a European perspective
– The making of fragile spaces in France and Germany - Volume 3 is an unpublished thesis entitled: From One Transition to Another. Urban Shrinkage and Post-fossil Futures in Eastern Germany.
Summary
In 2025, can East Germany be considered as a regional entity, at the risk of reifying and reinforcing West German representations of East German otherness? Or, concersely, can its reality be ignored, thereby overlooking the performative nature of imaginaries, lived experiences and hegemonic discourses? This thesis addresses this dual geographical question through the lens of urban studies, drawing on a broad theoretical corpus complemented by interviews with researchers, and underpinning the analysis with an empirical study of a small town in Saxony.
The first part of the dissertation explores the role of urban shrinkage in the regional crystallisation of eastern Germany, from three angles: urban dynamics, public action and academic knowledge of urban decline. The intense urban shrinkage that occurred around the early 2000s led to the implementation of a specific urban renewal programme (Stadtumbau Ost) for the new Länder, the study of which enabled East German urban research to gain scientific legitimacy that had long been contested. In the 2010s, as shrinkage normalised in small and medium-sized towns, the singularity of East German urban trajectories began to fade. Yet, after having long remained a blind spot in urban studies, the East German regional question resurfaced in 2020 as part of a lively debate, opening up a stimulating field of research.
In the second part, the hypothesis explored is that the intense experience of the long period of urban decline in East Germany, along with the federal political response of the 2000s, constitutes a spatialised disruption of the relationship to time—one that has left a lasting impact on both local actors and inhabitants, and contributes to the regional construction of eastern Germany in the 2020s. By examining how residents and local stakeholders relate to the future, the study reveals how the spatialised experience of post-socialist transformation and urban shrinkage during the 1990s and 2000s is reactivated in the local implementation of the energy transition in Lusatia in the 2020s. The promise of decarbonisation alters and multiplies geonarratives, whose tensions emerge from urban spaces, imprint and reshape them.
The constructivist perspective adopted here allows for a denaturalization of processes and operational mechanisms by shedding light on how they are conceived by their actors, designers, and also scientific observers. This research thus contributes to an interpretation of East German urban transformations not as processes determined by the socialist past, but rather as a series of co-transformations. At the same time, it views small East German towns as a contemporary observatory of the tensions between urban decline, ecological transition, and democratic fragility, and documents the diversity of decline processes and situations of left behindness in Europe.
The completion of this research benefited from the support of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Studies and Research on Germany (CIERA).
Jury
• Lydia COUDROY DE LILLE, Professor, Université Lyon II, EVS (Reviewer)
• Christophe DEMAZIÈRE, Professor, Université de Lille, TVES (Examiner)
• Nina GRIBAT, Professor, Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg, Institute of Urban Planning (Examiner)
• Béatrice VON HIRSCHHAUSEN, Research Director, CNRS, Géographie-Cités (Advisor)
• Hélène MAINET, Professor, Université Clermont Auvergne, Territoires (Examiner)
• Yoan MIOT, Professor, Université Gustave Eiffel, LATTS (Reviewer)
• Gábor SONKOLY, Director of Studies, EHESS, Géographie-Cités (Reviewer)
• Nicolas VERDIER, Research Director, CNRS, Director of Studies, EHESS, Géographie-Cités (Chair)
Weisswasser, Telux. © Roth, 2024.
