Privately organized collective housing is currently included in agendas for sustainable urban development in a range of European cities as a resource-efficient form of housing that prevents isolation and contributes to social cohesion within urban communities. However, research has shown that the recent surge of different forms of private-collective housing in Berlin could be a driver of gentrification and segregation. This article aims to uncover potential causes of the discrepancies between the ideological, and at times utopian, motivations underpinning self-build housing projects in the former East Berlin district Prenzlauer Berg, and their actual outcomes. I do so by analysing the literary (counter) discourse on self-build groups developed in Anke Stelling’s novels Bodentiefe Fenster [Floor-Length Windows] (2015) and Schäfchen im Trockenen (2018, published in English translation as Higher Ground in 2021). I show that the realization of socially progressive, or even utopian, plans for urban private-collective housing prove difficult, and sometimes impossible, for the characters in the novels, due to the influence of other societal structures such as gender and class inequalities, urban segregation and gentrification, discrimination and the neoliberal logic of individual competition and consumption.

The introduction to this Special Issue considers how literary and cultural representations of cities in transition contribute to interdisciplinary vocabularies for describing urban change beyond gentrification. By ‘urban change’ we refer to shifts in city and regional planning and real estate development, but also to environmental events, patterns of migration and informal uses of the city that shape how urban places transform. The introduction frames scholarship about what gentrification can and should describe as a debate about language and representation. We revisit critical discussions of gentrification and turn to areas of urbanist scholarship that have effectively modelled more specific approaches to describing urban change. We introduce the five articles in the Special Issue and contextualize how their engagement with representations of urban change in London, metropolitan Delhi, Lubumbashi, New York and Manchester intervene in interdisciplinary urban scholarship by offering new tools for describing urban change amid neo-liberal globalization.