The city as world-place: transterritorial flows and territorial order in a Nuremberg neighbourhood

Abstract

Approaching struggles for political representation through a perspective of `methodological transterritorialism', we seek to make sense of recent developments evolving around a territorialised urban neighbourhood. Werderau, a garden suburb founded by a mechanical engineering company at the beginning of the 20th century, enjoyed relative protection from globalising frictions and struggles until the `world-in-motion' suddenly penetrated the community a few years ago. We begin by charting the production of the bounded settlement as a site of alternate social ordering at a time of hyperindustrialisation and its imaginary role as a territorial heterotopia, symbolising order in a seemingly chaotic urban world. Turning to the owner's decision to sell the neighbourhood in 1998, we then argue that long-term inhabitants discursively frame the events following the decision as `transterritorial pollution' of their bounded community, reflected in the commodification of their neighbourhood and in an `invasion' of non-German home-owners. After discussing how longer term residents attempt to restabilise their identities by taking up a xenophobic discourse, we conclude by criticising policy-makers for responding solely in a territorial logic and for one-sidedly taking up the discourse advanced by long-term residents. Instead, we advance a utopian vision of the city as a worldly site where people live under conditions of `transcultural Gleich-Gültigkeit' in the double meaning of the German term: understood as being `indifferent' towards the proximate other as well as referring to equality and equal rights.