Description
This paper contributes towards the burgeoning literature dealing with the spatial governance of political and social Others. It specifically interrogates continuities of exclusionary policies pursued at particular spaces across different historical eras. It starts empirically by interrogating history of a building complex at East German city of Leipzig. The facilities in question have been used as a “workhouse” for homeless population in pre-WWI era, a Nazi forced labor camp, a psychological and venereological clinic by the communist regime, and since 2012 as an accommodation for asylum seekers. To make sense of this genealogy, I develop the notion of fungibility of exclusionary space which consists of the space serving the containment of social and political outsiders across different historical eras and political regimes. Drawing on historical records, official documents, and interviews with civil society actors, I argue that this fungibility is defined by mundane and unremarkable physical features of the site coupled with affective associations which posit it as a space which is outside of the fabric of the everyday life in the city.
