Contested geographical imaginings of reunification: A case study of urban change in Leipzig

Geopolitics and city restructuring are typically regarded as separate scales and processes: the international and national versus the local. The local politics of urban change in an east German city in the period after reunification question this divide. The ‘pathways’ approach to post-socialist transitions is utilized to illustrate how reunification is contested as much in neighbourhood restructuring and actions in response to incoming capital and the dominance of western legalpolitical norms as it is in national or international discourses and practices. Assumed divisions between East and West, professional and lay, and local and national are questioned.