This chapter familiarizes the reader with Leipzig and introduces the research strategy undergirding my analysis of neoliberal urban restructuring. The chapter begins with a brief outline of the history of the East German city since German reunification. I contextualize processes of German uneven development, neoliberalization, capital switching and political (de)regulation historically, and briefly introduce social movements and tenant struggles fighting these processes. Whilst urban neoliberalization is underway in Leipzig and the pressure on the city’s working-class residents is mounting, their resistance is not self-evident. To prepare the empirical inquiry of class composition and decomposition the chapter subsequently zooms into the working-class neighbourhood where I conducted the ethnographic micro-level study on secondary exploitation and political subjectivation between alienation and appropriation. The second half of the chapter is dedicated to a brief explanation of the methodology used for the research endeavour. I give an insight into the retroductive research strategy and the concrete methodology I relied on to realize a research project with the class compositional framework introduced in Chapter 2 .