ABSTRACT
This chapter is based on interviews with shopkeepers in Karl-Marx-Strabe and Mullerstrabe, as well as planners, regeneration officials, and so-called city managers active in the transformation of the streets. Age of high-speed, post-Fordist capitalism, local shopping streets are rarely strongholds of neighborhood's "authentic" character. Regeneration officials, who are the street's political agents of change, on shaping the future of their shopping street and contrasting interpretations of transformation by shopkeepers and officials interaction. By focusing on broad homogenizing narratives, these writings misses other equally important, "messier" processes of transformation, which cannot be boiled down to mere gentrification or segregation. As a shopkeepers Karl-Marx-Strabe, mullerstrabe provides the vision towards narrative of death. In some shopkeeper's narratives, supports for the plans and the enthusiasm of the regeneration officials also describe how shopkeepers arrive at the local market in the context of the street, the city, and modern urban life.
