The Local and International Press and the Gentrification of Western Leipzig (Germany): Between Promotional Narratives of Social Transformations and Late Discovery of the Negatives Consequences of Gentrification

Based on two corpora of articles from the local and international press between 2006 and 2018, this chapter shows how the press has accompanied the social transformations of Leipzig through the construction of a promotional narrative. This narrative legitimizes the process of gentrification in an incomplete and paradoxical way. On the one hand, it glorifies the actions of the creative population and the first symbolic entrepreneurs until the mid-2010s. On the other, it is much more critical of the real estate intensification that is currently taking place in the western districts, which is presented as undermining the cultural exceptionalism that has been built up since the early 2000s.