Industrial forever? Narratives, place identity, and the development path of the city of Zeitz, Germany

Abstract

There is a growing interest in understanding development processes and opportunities in small and medium-sized towns that so far did not attract much attention in mainstream urban theory. Conventional growth-oriented approaches fail to capture the complexity of local development and policy-making processes because they prioritise production factors and underrate the role of discourse and place-based identity. This paper aims to explore the linkages between narratives, place identity, and local development. As local actors try to make sense of a place’s past and future, they select, contribute to, and mobilise various local narratives. Multiple narratives feed into and are part of a place’s identity that defines a frame for possible development options. The paper uses the case of Zeitz in Saxony-Anhalt (Germany) to analyse the evolution of local development narratives from the 1970s until today. The paper concludes that: i) narrative-making is not a linear process; narratives, spatial imaginaries and local identity are complex, dynamic, and interconnected with each other; ii) local narratives help to construct a coherent imaginary of a place and are mutually intertwined with local development and policies; and iii) local narratives are interdependent with external events and strategies requiring a multiscalar relational perspective on local development processes.

Loss and change: Culture narratives in old industrial regions in East Germany

“…The analysis combines critical discourse analysis (CDA) as elaborated by Fairclough (e.g., Fairclough, 1992, 2003, 2005) and narrative analysis (here especially Czarniawska, 2004; see also Sandercock, 2003) into the novel approach of critical narrative analysis (CNA) (Gavriely‐Nuri, 2017; Görmar & Kinossian, 2022; Souto‐Manning, 2014). In line with the CPE perspective, CNA allows for the focus to be first on the micro level, that is, individual texts as stories including narrative structures and content (Shanahan et al, 2018), and then in a second step, to go beyond the micro level of narrative analysis by triangulating the results from the different materials and examining the interrelations of the semiotic elements with extra‐semiotic aspects of events and actions as well as social structures (as discussed, e.g., by Fairclough, 2013 in his approach to CDA).…”