OBSERVATIONS IN LEIPZIG - 3 TEMPORAL DIST INCTIONS WITH BIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES

In reviewing the transformation in East Germany differentiated local a nd subjective viewpoints are required in order for the processes to be understood. For this reason, an urban planner who has been active in Leipzig for over seven years, has tried to associate her biography wit h a significant place in East Germany. In Autumn of 1989, the second l argest city of the GDR burst into the headlines. On the one hand, repo rts accumulated about the desintegration of the country. At the same t ime, the precarious situation of the city itself reached public attent ion. In the euphoria of unification, the city was considered a future boomtown. Concurrently, a rapid deindustrialisation as well as a subur banisation of retail and commercial spaces was taking place. After a ' 'leaden time'' in the late 1980s, in which urban planning was countere d by a pathological process of urban development, the years of 1990-91 , when property lots began to function as an urban planning regulative , brought about a twofold culture shock among planners. The urban expe rience of the ''East'' was confronted with the urban concepts of the ' 'West''. A positivistic orientation of renewal and modernisation was a ccompanied by a drastic process of change in, and exploitation of, urb an space. With receding economic activity, however, it is becoming cle ar that despite five years of federal investments and private initiati ves, the question remains how the city can be heedfully renewed. Befor e the backdrop of a declining population, Leipzig is experiencing a pa ttern of spacial redistribution consisting of simultaneous growth and shrinkage with a suburbanisation and transformation accompanied by the signs of social erosion. The experience of dissolution and breaking a part is described by Richard Sennett as the end of welfare society. Su ch processes leave their traces also on the individual and may provide deja-vu experiences when compared with the 1980s in the GDR.