Capitalist Futures and Socialist Legacies: Urban Development in East Germany Since 1990

Since unification, the political, economic, and institutional structuresin the new federal states have been patterned in accordance with theWest German model. This is due in part to the extension of theWestern legal framework to the eastern Länder. The fact that thepolitical and economic actors of the once-socialist country are nowsubject to the institutional conditions of the West encourages convergencetowards the western model. But questions have been raised asto whether the cities in the new federal states are also adaptingrapidly to the western model of urban development. Their layoutand architecture resulted, after all, from the investment decisionsmade by several generations and cannot be shifted or transformed asrapidly as legal or institutional frameworks.