Street lighting and the uneasy coexistence of socialist and capitalist urban imaginaries
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4476629 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Samantha Maurer Fox (0000-0001-7640-2362, New School, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 38 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 646-663 |
| Publication date | 2020-08-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Environment and Planning D Society and Space (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0263-7758 • E-ISSN: 1472-3433 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0263775820909140 |
| OpenAlex | W3012005305 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
| References cited | 34 |
This essay examines the partial privatization of street lamps in Eisenhüttenstadt, Germany. Founded in 1950 as Stalinstadt, East Germany's steel manufacturing hub and socialist utopia, today the city suffers from economic shrinkage and depopulation. In 2014, Eisenhüttenstadt's government privatized approximately 10% of the city's street lamps, a response to both the city's shrunken tax base and to the Energiewende, Germany's national push toward renewable energy, which has led to the precipitous rise of consumer energy costs. I examine privatized street lamps within the broader context of Eisenhüttenstadt's technological and sociopolitical development. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, I show how, during the socialist era, street lamps were an essential instrument in the construction and conceptualization of socialist urban space. Since privatization, they have come to signify the fractured and radically individualized nature of capitalist urban space. As such, I reveal how socialism-and the rupture caused by its abrupt replacement with capitalism-remains present and perceptible in the urban landscape, and how that presence poses challenges for urban planners and municipal officials working in Eisenhüttenstadt today, 30 years after East Germany's dissolution
Capitalism · Communism · Context (archaeology · Economics · Economy · Geography · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Socialism · Sociology · State socialism · Utopia · Ecology, Conservation, and Geographical Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Water Governance and Infrastructure
Public and private in thought and practice
The Dialogic Imagination
The Promise of Infrastructure
The Unmaking of Soviet Life
Present Pasts
Splintering Urbanism
The Vanishing Hectare
Magnetic Mountain
Cities under Socialism—and After
The Future in Ruins
Exit-Voice Dynamics and the Collapse of East Germany
Imperial Debris
The Ghosts of Berlin
Democracy's Infrastructure
Post-Soviet Social
What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next
Where the World Ended
Friction
Whatever happened to the (post)socialist city
What Was So Socialist about the Socialist City? Second World Urbanity in Europe
The gloomy city
Dreamworld and catastrophe
Paradoxical Infrastructures
Fragment urbanism
Disenchanted Night
A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction
Landscapes and Throughscapes in Italian Forest Worlds
An Anthropology of Luminosity
The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure
Goods and States
Semiotics and the social analysis of material things
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,67 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2026 (4) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |