ABSTRACT
The passage to a post-Fordist economy and a new globalism has been described as being fairly intricate for East Germany. Recently, demographic change and the continued outmigration of educated workforce to West and South Germany have contributed to a weakening of local human capital in East Germany's peripheries while emptying urban cores of inhabitants and a qualified workforce. The strategic, actor-related definition takes place-making as part of a process of governance based on a sense of collective identity. Place-making needs a critical mass of governance capacity, a combined effort by local actors and institutions in order to be effective. The economy of the city of Jena seems to have experienced a successful transformation from monostructural old-industrial offsets at the beginning of the 1990s to a modern mix of branches ten years later. The initial structure was dominated by the traditional optical industry which the socialist regime had built around the remnants of the pre-war Carl Zeiss Corporation.
