THE SPATIAL AND SOCIAL MARGINALIZATION OF NORDHAUSEN IN THE AUTONOMOUS REGION OF THURINGEN IN EASTERN GERMANY

Mikel Dierssen, University of Barcelona, Spain

The aim of the paper is to present the effects of spatial and social marginalization of the town of Nordhausen in the Autonomous Region of Thüringen in eastern Germany (former GDR) and the relationship of this process to the capitalist globalization. The paper focuses on presenting the social responses to these processes, illustrated by a factory that was temporarily occupied by his former employees and who afterwards organized the production in a self-managed/self-governed manner. Nordhausen, just as almost all localities of Thüringen, and just as many other localities in eastern Germany, is suffering since years (roughly from the late 1990s on) a constant net loss of population, i.e. is affected by the phenomenon of depopulation. Therefore the town is one of the places where the territorial planners attempt to implement the concept of diminished cities (in German: "geschrumpfte Stadt"). That concept arose in German urban planning as a reaction to the appearance of the phenomenon of demographic reduction of cities and entire regions, especially in eastern Germany from the 1990s on. As a result the concept proposes to reduce physically the affected locations, i.e. to accept the fact of losing population (mainly provoked by migration) and to implement the demolition of part of its morphological substance to combat by this way its transformation into ghost towns.