The work of the German architect Oswald Mathias Ungers has grown into a highly individual oeuvre which includes seminal buildings such as the Galeria and the German Museum of Architecture in Frankfurt. In The Dialectic City, Ungers focuses on contemporary attempts to face the problems created by de-industrialization, particularly on the peripheries of cities.As case studies, he takes eight recent projects, most of which were created for cities in the former East Germany, and uses these to illustrate the variety of problems and conditions facing the architect working on major planning schemes of this kind.