Unrest and violence in urban space repeatedly represent projection surfaces for discursive escalations and political interpretive dominances. With Stuart Hall, they can be understood as conjunctures in which situational events and media-discursive interpretive struggles are embedded in a larger negotiation structure. The analysis of hegemonic and oppositional codes of events opens up this contested space. In the following, the so-called Krawallnächte in Stuttgart and Frankfurt in the summer of 2020 will be used as an example to trace this space through conjunctural analysis. It becomes apparent that the oppositional reading challenges and repoliticizes the securitizing and racializing/culturalizing strategies of the hegemonic narrative. The strategies that both codes use are presented in this article.