Suburbanisation in East Germany
研究了东德统一后郊区化的过程,发现其依赖三种新自由主义政策:刺激新建租赁住房、推广自有住房、通过规划漏洞优待郊区,认为新自由主义和后社会主义改革是一体两面。
Rampant suburbanisation is one of the most visible changes evidenced in cities throughout Central and Eastern Europe in the past three decades. In this paper, we analyse how suburbanisation unfolded in East Germany after reunification. We do this against the background of ongoing debates about the usefulness and meaning of the term post-socialism that have questioned the self-enclosed spatiality of the concept and suggest giving the concept of neoliberalisation a more central role in analysing the changes experienced in this part of the world. We show that the suburbanisation process in East Germany rested on three neoliberal policy orientations: (1) extensive investment stimuli for the construction of new rental housing, (2) promotion of home ownership and (3) the privileging of suburban locations through planning gaps. Since all these policies are based on neoliberal ideas, we argue that neoliberalisation and post-socialist reform agendas have appeared as two sides of the same coin. Against this background, we advocate putting the developments that came after socialism at the centre of the research and call for a new generation of studies on post-socialist neoliberalisation.