The opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of state socialism in Europe marked not only the exhaustion of a particular political project, but also, as Susan Buck-Morss has it, the passing of mass Utopia that "was the driving ideological force of industrial modernization" in both its capitalist and socialist forms, with its "belief that the industrial reshaping of the world is capable of bringing about the good society by providing material happiness for the masses."² This mass Utopia was based on the notion of full employment and a regime of social rights linked to the status of citizen as worker. This regime of social rights, although never properly universal or secure, finds itself today under erasure, and not only in formerly socialist countries. In his recent work Bürger, ohne Arbeit [Citizens, without Work], Wolfgang Engler argues that "the social question of the twenty-first century is the question of the fate of millions of people for whom contemporary capitalism apparently no longer has any use. What will happen with these surplus people?"³ Complementing the chaotic nexus of informal labor and urbanization in the global south that Mike Davis describes in his Planet of Slums, the shrinking postindustrial cities of Europe and North America round out the picture of our contemporary conjuncture.⁴