Introduction: Urban plots, organizing cities

This chapter explores the processual nature of urban phenomena, considering the organizational aspects of urban space and the material features of organizations as having a common, heterogeneous ground. A matter of concern is the machinery around which entities are assembled and challenged. Cities are intrinsically indeterminate entities, and they are constantly constructed through controversies where action is distributed among actors and actants that assemble, re-present and translate each other. The issue of public noise in the historic city centre as reported in the local newspapers provided useful insights into this mechanism. The chapter comprises various contributions in which memory has become a major issue within discussion on urban reorganization. Grning's analysis is emblematic in this regard, because it deals with the urban transformation of East German cities, and particularly with the tangle of symbolic and material traces of the city of Leipzig.