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To understand Leipzig as a case study for civic engagement, this section will first provide an overview of the city’s historic and political context, including its residents’ experience under the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). Second, this review will explain the unique context of local democracy in Leipzig and the outside factors influencing the development of democratic institutions in the city government. Finally, this section will describe the current infrastructure for civic engagement in the City of Leipzig and the outcomes it has produced.

For centuries, Leipzig has been an important geographic nexus, connecting the north and south, and bridging the east and west. Since its founding at the crossroads of two ancient trade routes, connecting Spain to Ukraine and Italy to the Baltic, Leipzig has been a center of international trade and became a hub for German manufacturing and banking. The city also has great cultural importance, as the home to one of the oldest universities in Germany and to historical figures like Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Johann Wolfgan von Goethe, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Approximately one-fourth of the city was destroyed by Allied air raids during World War II, and then later rebuilt by the East German government, the GDR. However, the East German government did not adequately invest in the city’s infrastructure or historic buildings. By 1989, the city could not “meet the needs of municipal organization and communication,” and photos broadcasted of historic structures’ “unbelievably poor conditions… created outrage among the public.”¹

Despite the state of public infrastructure in the city, Lepizig was an economic hub for the entire Soviet bloc, acting as “a meeting point of the two blocks, a gate between East and West.” Though its historic trade fair no longer has national importance, during the GDR era, it meant that Leipzig retained a somewhat more open culture thanks to its many international and western visitors.²

One potential outcome of this openness is the role that Leipzig played in ending the GDR regime. The city was one of hundreds of locations where workers held mass protests in 1953, which ended with military force and martial law by Soviet forces.³ By 1989, many people in East Germany were pushing for democratic reforms and had begun gathering at peace prayer events hosted at the Protestant St. Nicholas Church (Nikolaikirche) in Leipzig every Monday night,⁴ which ultimately led to a mass protest on October 9.⁵ Despite the fear of police violence—and the presence of armed soldiers—between 70,000–100,000 people peacefully marched in Leipzig that night,⁶ calling for reforms to the GDR⁷ while walking past the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) headquarters.⁸ Rallies continued in Leipzig and other parts of East Germany,⁹ and on October 17, the politburo removed GDR President Erich Honecker. The protests continued, including a demonstration of 500,000 in Berlin on November 4. The Berlin Wall fell on November 9.¹⁰ After the fall of the GDR, Leipzig became known as the “Hero City” (Heldenstadt), which it is still referred to today.¹¹

During reunification, however, many people moved west, including young people who left for better jobs. Brain drain and socio-psychological pessimism resulted from these demographic changes, as well as high levels of blight.¹² Leipzig became a shrinking city¹³ until 2002, when the population finally grew again after continuous decline since 1965.¹⁴ This trend has continued, and between 1990 and 2020, the population increased by 16 percent.¹⁵ As of 2020, the city had a population of 605,407 people.¹⁶

While the city now has the nickname “Hypezig”¹⁷ and is known as a trendy city, some problems from the GDR and reunification era still remain. First, the economy in Eastern Germany still lags somewhat behind the West. Eleven years after reunification in 2001, 17 percent of people in the former East were unemployed, compared to an average of 7 percent in Western states.¹⁸ By 2020, the gap was only two points: 8.1 percent versus 6.1 percent.¹⁹ Still, Eastern Germans today face lower wages, productivity, and living standards,²⁰ and Leipzig was temporarily named the poverty capital of Germany in 2011. Second, the region still has an aging and declining workforce and general population.²¹ While more people are moving to the east, the average age in the five states was still 45 or above in 2017.²² In Leipzig, the average age is 42.8 for the overall population, though foreigners and residents with an immigrant background tend to be younger, with average ages of 32.8 and 30.8, respectively.²³

As a result of this history and the city’s development, Leipzig currently experiences many public challenges shared by cities around the world, including increasing housing prices and gentrification, long-term demographic change, a strained education system, insufficient public transportation, shifts due to climate change, and economic stress.

Thanks to its role in the 1989 uprisings, a spirit of civic engagement has become one of the Hero City’s (Heldenstadt) defining traits. However, its civic roots are much older.

Historically, Leipzig was considered a “citizen city” (��ü����������ٲ����). This differentiated it from its southeast neighbor, Dresden, the capital of Saxony, which was classified as a "residential city" (Residenzstadt). While the royal court was the center of decision-making in a city like Dresden, a ��ü����������ٲ���� was ruled by the citizenry.²⁴ The outcome was that people in Leipzig had to be more self-sufficient. As Wolfgang Kurz, a former official in the city planning office, put it in 2003, “Leipzig has a relatively strong tradition of civic activity and civic commitment” without “such a pronounced mentality or attitude of obedience to authority” as in the Residenzstadt. Instead, those in Leipzig “always had to rely on their own skills and resources and a certain degree of pragmatism can be found in Leipzig”²⁵—an ethos similar to American ruggedness.

However, under the GDR, residents in Leipzig lived with severe restrictions on political and individual freedoms. In this period, a city administration was effectively the lowest hierarchical element in the centralized, one-party system, so decisions would often be handed down from higher up. Additionally, while citizens may have elected city council members, the Social Unity Party (SED) selected the candidates.²⁶

Even so, some degree of political participation was still present during the GDR era. Historian Mary Fulbrook describes the authoritarian regime as a “participatory dictatorship” because it “involved large numbers of its citizens in its political structures and processes.” Among adults, one in five was a member of the SED, and most belonged to the state trade union. Among the youth, the majority belonged to state youth organizations.²⁷ Engagement outside the political infrastructure of the state was minimal—confined to the Protestant church and, later, to dissident and pro-democracy groups—and participation could result in negative consequences.²⁸ Likewise, refusal to join “voluntary organizations,” like the SED, could impact someone’s ability to get a job, get into college, travel outside the country,²⁹ and more. However, the country did allow citizens to participate in some specific policy areas, such as healthcare, demography, gender, leisure, housing, and work that were not related to human rights abuses.³⁰ These opportunities included controlled public discussions and formal “letters of complaint” (Eingaben) that required government response. One motive for the government in creating these channels was to “help improve conditions of life because they saw those issues as impacting worker productivity and satisfaction.”³¹ Another was to monitor public opinion.³² But citizens could use these channels to engage in the political system, express criticism, and to try to “build a better society, or at least to make the best of the present” through activities like “beautify[ing] their village, construct[ing] a new swimming pool, or organiz[ing] a youth sports festival.”³³

When West and East Germany were reunited in 1990, the Western German system replaced all Eastern legal, political, economic, and bureaucratic institutions without retaining many qualities or input from the Eastern structure.³⁴ As part of the reunification process, cities re-established local self-government, a system of federalism, and a bureaucratic structure based on citizen rights with an orientation towards service.³⁵ During this process, many Western Germans moved to the East, drawn by cheap land and property, curiosity, and to help establish a new societal structure. However, this temporary help turned into a permanent elite-transfer,³⁶ which has resulted in many positions of power in Eastern government and business being held by Western Germans instead of Eastern Germans, even today.³⁷

During the “turning point” (Wende), or the “period of political change around 1989,”³⁸ Eastern Germany experienced a “time of awakening” (Aufbruchszeit), when the sudden democratic freedoms spurred “relatively widespread citizen participation.” Under the GDR, there were many groups that already worked on local issues, but they could now do so more openly. In addition to these existing groups and the civil society organizations that were transferred into Eastern German society, other citizens formed new groups. Additionally, the historic nature of the moment also gave citizens the sense that “they could truly change things in society.”³⁹ Barbara Baumgärtel, who has lived in the Waldstraßenviertel quarter of Leipzig since 1954, got involved in her neighborhood association after reunification because she wanted to take advantage of the new opportunity to participate in democracy. Around her, she observed that people “had a democratic say for the first time and many wanted to use that.” Like her, “people wanted to help make their district more livable, organize something for art and culture, take care of the old people who were overwhelmed with the new situation and much more.” At the time, joining a Verein was “the best way to do that.”⁴⁰ However, Christian Bollert, a journalist and the head of media relations for the organization We Are The East (Wir Sind Der Osten), points out that engagement was mostly around responding to the immediate crisis at that time: “People were unemployed and they were fighting for their own lives and not thinking about a nice bike lane in front of their house.”⁴¹

The reunification period also provided exciting new opportunities to participate with some parts of the city government. Because the City of Leipzig was adapting to the new situation—and the people in the administration often did not have much experience—Ralf Elsässer notes that others outside government “could have a little more influence with suggestions and concepts on conceptual processes of the administration itself.” According to Elsässer, the leader of a Leipzig-based organization that works to support civic engagement and civil society in Saxony, there were “a lot more decisions and plans processed in a very short time,” so “more participation was possible” as the city rebuilt.⁴² Former Deputy Mayor for Urban Development and Construction (1990-1995) Nils Gormsen described a “willingness to listen to everyone and to discuss matters openly in order to find the best solution,” as embodied by practices like round tables—a type of discussion forum that emphasized consensus-based, unified decisions, sometimes focused on specific issues.⁴³ Professor of public administration Jean-Claude Garcia-Zamor argues that the round tables “prevented anarchy and violence” while also “becoming one of the most important foundations of a new democratic culture in East Germany.”⁴⁴

But according to Karsten Gerkens, who worked to implement civic engagement efforts as the head of Urban Regeneration during reunification, the city’s efforts could be inconsistent. Gerkens explains that his department’s engagement efforts often made him feel like “the fire brigade” — there to solve problems when they arise, and then withdraw. To do so in a sustainable way, they tried to collaborate with forms of engagement that already existed in the neighborhood, such as citizen groups. But that model didn’t translate over the long term into sustained engagement by the city or citizen associations.⁴⁵

According to Elsässer, in the mid-1990s, as many residents moved out of Leipzig to pursue other, often professional, opportunities, the number of people who would participate decreased, and so did opportunities for engagement. As a result, the civil society culture suffered in Leipzig.⁴⁶ This was a common trend in eastern Germany at the time. For example, between 1995-1997, the average citizen “belonged to 1.44 organizations, but only 0.78 in 1999.”⁴⁷ Barbara Baumgärtel, the former head of the Waldstrassenviertel Neighborhood Verein,⁴⁸ was in her late thirties when the wall fell. In 2005, she noted that while there was a euphoric spirit during the turning point (Wende) period after 1989 with “project groups, exhibitions, public debates, and workshops,” people were “not able to give this spirit a structure” or a “lasting foundation.”⁴⁹

When the city began to grow again in the 2000s, “a new generation of committed people came along, and a different climate had emerged.”⁵⁰ But by this point, the city administration had “developed into a functioning administration that also does a lot itself.”⁵¹ As a result, Baumgärtel noted in 2004 that without that institutionalization, “participation [today] may happen on a formal base but without satisfying results.”

Over time, however, the city has shifted back towards a more participatory approach. Elsässer notes that for many years, the group of people advocating for incorporating engagement was relatively small. But recently, engagement has “simply become a matter of course again and something that is also actively supported by the administration.” One reason for this is because the administration has seen a demand for engagement that does not only come from the same group of residents.⁵² Another factor has been that the administration has seen benefits from the engagement that it has carried out thus far. While the newly professionalized administration was less receptive to engagement overall, Elsässer found there was still institutional willingness to participate in projects. As various sections of the city government have worked on individual projects over time, those experiments’ success “[have] shown administration employees what is possible in terms of positive effects of citizen participation.” In particular, he believes that these projects have indicated that public participation on complex topics like budget planning is possible, have demonstrated for the administration how to carry out engagement, and have proven that such collaboration with residents “supports the administration’s own work rather than hampers it.” Additionally, the city’s Democracy Balance working group, which carried out an audit of participation and engagement in the city from 2002 to 2005, helped set the foundation for the city’s guidelines for engagement and supported individual departments to “practice citizen participation more intensely,” including those who would not have done so on their own.⁵³

Though the GDR period ended thirty years ago, many interviewees agreed that the history still impacts politics today. According to Jörg Reichert, a resident who helps run the Leipzig chapter of the national Code for Germany project, the lack of trust that citizens felt in government under the East German regime and as a result of reunification is still present in politics today.⁵⁴ This is particularly true for older generations who lived through the high hopes and deep disappointments of the Wende period. Their fears are particularly directed at the state and federal levels. But at the local level, Reichert still sees a lack of trust in politics and a belief that city leaders will ultimately follow their preferences over citizens’.⁵⁵ In Bollert’s experience, some people will say, “I don’t understand what the government does and they possibly have their own agenda.”⁵⁶ To Stefan Heinig, the former Office of City Planning department head (2018-2020), history has impacted different generations in different ways. There is not one single East German experience: Some residents who feel they lost during reunification may be more resistant to government decisions, those who were socialized under the GDR may prefer government to act decisively, and others who felt like winners from reunification, particularly value the freedom and democracy they have in the city today.⁵⁷ Even its history as a "citizen city" is still present: A city employee who works closely on engagement efforts emphasized that Leipzig has a strong citizenry even today.⁵⁸

In recent years, Leipzig has been internationally recognized as a strong democratic city. In addition to “its active dissident past under the communist regime, its central role in the peaceful revolution of 1989, [and] the explosion of grassroots citizens’ groups beginning in late 1989,” political science professor Christiane Olivo cites “the structures put in place by the city government to enhance communication with, and policy input from, the citizenry” as a reason that Leipzig can be called the “city of democracy in Eastern Germany.”⁵⁹ In 1999, Leipzig won second prize in the Bertelsmann Foundation-sponsored competition “Citizen Oriented Municipalities—Avenues to Strengthen Democracy.” And in 2019, the city was a finalist for the international Innovation Politics Award thanks to its 2018 “Year of Democracy” (Jahr der Demokratie) initiative.⁶⁰

In addition to its history, current public policy challenges, and modern political climate, Leipzig presents an interesting case study in local democracy because of the promising infrastructure for engagement that the city government has developed.

Today, the City of Leipzig has five guidelines for civic participation:

• “Citizen participation benefits all sides: Citizens, city council, and administration are equally involved and benefit from the mutual exchange of knowledge on the respective project.
• Every citizen can get involved: Everyone who is interested has the chance to get involved in the participation process within the scope of his or her own possibilities. You can take part in workshops or use online platforms. Another method is surveys.
• Participation strengthens the city council and administration: Citizen participation has a supportive effect on the decisions of the city council, and enables the administration to plan more reliably in its tasks.
• Citizen participation takes place at an early stage, in parallel with the process, and in several stages: In planning and decision-making processes, public participation accompanies both the administrative and the political process from the start. Citizens are also involved across all project stages—from the goal—setting to implementation.”⁶¹
• Citizen participation coordination advises and supports all those involved: “The coordinator acts as a contact point for all participation issues and supervises and advises the participation projects throughout the entire process, depending on the city-wide importance of the project to varying degrees.”⁶²

The rules for engagement were created through a working group consisting of representatives from the citizenry and administration, as well as the worlds of politics and science. In 2012, the mayor adopted the guidelines and informed the city council.⁶³ When the guidelines were announced in 2012, the city argued that they would improve citizens’ ability to “get up-to-date information on the status of specific projects,” “bring their own view and competencies into the discussion,” and to help produce “collaborative planning between the administration, the decisions of the city council, and the ideas of the citizens,” while still retaining the decision-making capacity of city government.

In addition to these guidelines, the City of Leipzig approaches engagement through a “Trialog” model developed in part by participation expert Dr. Helmut Klages, among others. The Trialog considers three categories of engagement partners: the residents, politicians, and city administration.⁶⁴ According to an official in the administration who works closely on these issues, leaders in the engagement process aim to make sure that participation and representation are balanced between each of the three areas.⁶⁵ In Leipzig, the official explained that the three sides of the Trialog must all get involved and benefit from the engagement process.⁶⁶ The tri-sectoral approach to civic engagement is common in other German cities, too, sometimes with a framework that focuses on citizens, the administration, and businesses.⁶⁷

To put these ideas into practice, the City of Leipzig has a multi-part, formal infrastructure for civic engagement that provides multiple opportunities for resident participation. The following list offers a summary of some of the main elements of municipally-supported engagement. A full description of each entity, as well as related engagement tools and a description of the city’s current municipal structure, can be found in the appendix.

City Council

In addition to engagement with constituents led by individual city council members, the Leipzig City Council has expanded advisory councils into additional opportunities for representative democracy:

• Youth Parliament (Jugendparlament): The Youth Parliament is a body made up of 20 young Leipzig residents who are between 14–21 years old, and are elected by other residents in the same age range. Through the parliament and its youth advisory council, members can submit motions to the full city council. The youth parliament itself has an annual budget of €5,000 EUR (around $5,900 USD).⁶⁸
• Subject Area Advisory Councils (�󲹳�����𾱰�ä�ٱ�): In addition to the youth council, the city council has 11 advisory bodies, specializing in drugs, equality, children and families, migrants, psychiatry, seniors, disability, animal welfare, crime prevention, allotment gardens, and conservation. The councils are made up of residents with relevant expertise and members of the city council. Councils also have the right to submit motions to the full city council, but they do not have their own funding or budget.⁶⁹
• Neighborhood Councils: In addition to representation through the city council, the City of Leipzig also includes neighborhood councils. The 10 district councils (���ٲ���ٲ��������������𾱰�ä�ٱ�) and 14 regional councils (�����ٲ����󲹴ڳٲ���ä�ٱ�) act as advisory councils for the neighborhoods and independent municipalities of Leipzig, respectively.⁷⁰ Starting with the 2021–2022 budget, district councils receive €50,000 EUR (around $59,000 USD) in funding a year,⁷¹ and the regional councils receive €6 EUR (about $7 USD) per inhabitant per year.⁷²

City Administration

Within the administration, the City of Leipzig supports several other noteworthy avenues to engagement that can be replicated elsewhere:

• City Office (���ٲ���ٲ�ü����): The City Office is a physical location that acts as a “platform for citizen participation and civic engagement” and as a link between residents and the administration. Residents can visit the office to request help or share feedback. The office often hosts exhibits and events on engagement.
• Leipzig Thinking Ahead (Leipzig weiter denken, LWD): As the coordination office for resident participation, the LWD initiative is tasked with supporting the administration's civic engagement efforts. It is part of the Urban Development department, but works with departments across the city that are interested in incorporating participation into their projects. The LWD office also trains city employees, supports opportunities for engagement, and plays a quality assurance role.⁷³
• Neighborhood Management (Quartiersmanagement): These neighborhood-specific groups are also formed in partnership between nonprofits or associations and city departments. The city and department are responsible for tasks and financing, and the association hires a district moderator who acts as a contact person with whom residents can collaborate. Like the ���ٲ���ٲ��������������𾱰�ä�ٱ� and �����ٲ����󲹴ڳٲ���ä�ٱ�, Quartiersmanagement (neighborhood management) groups act as mediators⁷⁴ between the administration and its constituents, but the Quartiersmanagement groups are more affiliated with city departments instead of the city council. They also receive funding from the city,⁷⁵ and each cost between €50,00–100,000 EUR a year.⁷⁶
• Time-Specific Initiatives: Occasionally, the city will create specific initiatives on civic engagement, such as the Year of Democracy (Jahr der Demokratie), which come from the city council⁷⁷ and are sometimes funded in part by the federal government.⁷⁸
• Participatory Budgeting: The City of Leipzig will carry out a dedicated participatory budgeting program from 2023–2024.
• Civic Engagement List: The city publishes a list of current civic engagement projects on its website so that residents or city departments who are interested in participating can find relevant information.
• Individual Initiatives:
  • City Funding: In addition to funding for the above participation models, residents and associations may receive city funding for civic engagement and community-related projects.⁷⁹
  • Citizen Recognition: The city also gives out a variety of awards and honors for engaged residents.

In addition to these city-initiated efforts, Leipzig must also follow and recognize some state and federal requirements for formal engagement. For example, the Federal Building Act requires providing the public with plans and including rejected suggestions from the public in a municipal statement. Municipalities must also give public presentations on a plans’ goals and purposes.⁸⁰ Additionally, Saxony does set some direct democracy tools for the state, local, and county levels.⁸¹ Compared to other states, however, Saxony was ranked by More Democracy! (Mehr Demokratie!), a direct democracy NGO (non-governmental organization), as mediocre at the state level and sufficient for the local level, largely because the quorums for these tools are high enough to act as a “deterrent.”⁸²

As described above, the City of Leipzig has developed a multi-part infrastructure for engagement, which broadly consists of two parts: expanded representative democracy and city-led information-sharing and deliberation opportunities. This infrastructure is very promising and has many benefits, particularly in the ways that it allows for more residents to participate in influential government bodies. However, the general emphasis on information-sharing is a limitation of the engagement approach, and there are areas where the execution could improve. Even so, the municipal government-supported opportunities for engagement have improved over time, and both the positive and negative lessons can be useful to American cities, particularly when considering how a city’s history can influence present engagement.

Broadly, the city’s infrastructure indicates that supporting participation is a priority of the administration. Particularly through their LWD office, the city administration seems to recognize the importance of instituting civic engagement as a formal part of the municipal government, though its efforts have required trial and error. Something like the LWD office provides an institutional backbone for the city’s engagement efforts. In a city audit of engagement from 2016, the LWD office was “praised for its willingness to experiment with new processes and for the quality of processes carried out there.”⁸³

Second, the administration’s approach to representative democracy expands the traditional city council model to include several councils that Leipzig residents can serve on. The Youth Parliament, neighborhood councils, district councils, and subject area councils provide residents with the ability to make concrete changes in their city and participate in decision-making. It is also notable that in many cases, these councils are designed to improve representation and political power for communities that are traditionally excluded from these processes, including youth, immigrants, and residents with disabilities. Though these opportunities are not available to all constituents, they provide a meaningful platform for bringing new perspectives into governing institutions.

Additionally, the city’s individual participation projects, which largely take the shape of information-sharing and deliberation opportunities, have often been effective. According to that same 2016 report published by the city, participation helped to “reduce fears and concerns about upcoming tasks and projects,” strengthen local democracy and neighborhood structures and identities, the collaboration between city employees and constituents, as well as fellow employees in different offices, and increase acceptance and democratic legitimacy, especially for the city council.⁸⁴ The report also found that the city was able to support engagement on broad topics (such as housing policy), and that administrators were becoming more aware of the benefits of engagement.⁸⁵

However, some residents, politicians, and contributors to the city administration’s efforts see room for improvement, including in the areas of consistency and implementation, resources, sharing power with residents, willingness to support engagement, transparency, equity, and timely engagement. In interviews, some residents reflected that they are still not satisfied with the outcomes of engagement, or may feel that the city administration will ultimately make decisions alone rather than in true collaboration with constituents. Some residents feel that city departments won’t even accept information from citizen associations, even if they have hired experts, and that the majority of the city council typically votes in alignment with the administration.⁸⁶ According to Baumgärtel, “participation is made possible in a purely formal manner” today.⁸⁷

Looking at the administration’s infrastructure for engagement, Dieter Rink argues that Leipzig currently meets the lowest levels of Arnstein’s ladder successfully. Rink, who is the head of the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research’s Department of Urban and Environmental and an occasional collaborator with the city, believes the administration executes practices of informing and consulting with residents particularly well. However, he says that “real opportunities for co-decision are relatively small.” This focus on consulting over coproduction is common in many American cities, as well, and in Leipzig, the emphasis is deliberate.⁸⁸ When the city released civic engagement guidelines in 2012, it was clear that the resident participation it envisioned did not “explicitly intervene in the decision-making mechanisms of representative democracy,” with the administration still in charge of planning and the city council responsible for political decisions.⁸⁹ Similarly, a city report argues that “consistently combining formats of representative democracy and local participation processes” like this is the only way to produce “a successful, future-oriented and sustainable governance concept.”⁹⁰

Some of these criticisms—that the city provides more information than fully participatory opportunities, that administrators are not always receptive to engagement, and that residents’ participation is not clearly reflected in decision-making—have been consistent over time. A 2014 report from the Bertelsmann Foundation found in a survey that respondents in Leipzig agreed that “we conduct many procedures in which citizens are heard and participate in political discussions, but the final decision is made by the city council.” This was true for all cities included in the survey, but for Leipzig, 50 percentage points more respondents agreed with that statement than the alternative: “we have many procedures in which citizens can decide on important political issues.”⁹¹ In her research on engagement in the city from 2011, Olivo came to the conclusion that Quartiersmanagement forums tended to be “more informational than participatory.”

The city’s two studies on local engagement have come to similar conclusions. Most recently, the administration’s challenges included limited resources, inconsistent participation from administrative and political leaders, and lack of transparency after participation.⁹² Participants in the study also reported a lack of clarity around basic participation: how residents or companies could initiate a civic engagement process themselves.⁹³ At that same time, Dr. Raban Fuhrmann, an expert on civic engagement who contributed to the audit of participation in Leipzig, commented that the city is “good at downstream citizen participation,” and their efforts “concentrate on projects that have already been planned and reach the committed citizens and those affected,” but could improve by including more residents.⁹⁴ However, these types of challenges are not unique to Leipzig; many American cities experience them, as well.

Some interviewees believe that even if there are areas where the city could do better, engagement has improved over the last few years. According to Mohammad Okasha, a representative on the Migrant Council, “a lot has changed and improved in the last 2-3 years.” He attributes this to increased activism from residents, particularly from the immigrant community. Ralf Elsässer, who has worked with the City of Leipzig on civic engagement since 1996, has also seen changes in Leipzig residents. Today, he sees more initiatives, and “more young adults who are committed to issues themselves,” in particular to sustainability. As a result, the city has been able to shift away from advancing projects in small groups and instead does more networking, and provides support for others doing related work.⁹⁵ Finally, while Thorsten Mehnert, a board member of the local Wake Up Corners Foundation (Stiftung Ecken Wecken),⁹⁶ would like to see the city improve in some ways, he “believe[s] that Leipzig is already on a very good path.”⁹⁷

But while engagement may be improving, damage from earlier failed participation efforts may still influence how residents engage with the city. According to Bollert, if residents had the impression from 2000 to 2010 that they could make a difference, there might be “a bigger chance to be really progressive and modern” today, but says that this opportunity has passed. Instead, residents still feel that decisions were made inside the city hall without their input.⁹⁸ And ultimately, while the city’s engagement efforts “get better and better in the long run, the problem is that the missed chances don’t come back.”⁹⁹

While Leipzig’s history of engagement and political change gives it a unique civic spirit, this may also contribute to some residents’ disappointment, according to Olivo. One group member told her that during the turning point (Wende) period, “many people thought that through their work [in associations] they could change something, really influence things. But in the end, many had to realize that it is not like that.” During the Wende, East Germans were promised miracles and “blooming landscapes.”¹⁰⁰ Like with many other things, local democracy in practice was not quite what people had hoped for. According to Bollert, people believed from 1989 through 1992 that they “had a voice.” Later, they were disappointed to learn that “they don’t have a voice, or that they had a voice, but it was not powerful.”