The Afterlife of Utopia: Urban Renewal in Germany’s Model Socialist City

My current ethnographic project, The Afterlife of Utopia: Urban Renewal in Germany’s Model Socialist City, examines Eisenhüttenstadt, a city on the border between Germany and Poland. Founded in 1950 and originally named Stalinstadt, Eisenhüttenstadt was planned as an East German socialist utopia and steel manufacturing hub. During the socialist era, the city thrived. Then came German reunification. In the decades that followed, the city lost over half its population as the steel plant laid off three-quarters of its workforce. But municipal leaders were prescient: they incorporated city-owned real estate in order to circumvent its sale to real estate speculators—after all, as one informant told me, housing belongs to the “social realm.” As a result, those municipal leaders have been able to undertake urban renewal projects at a scale unmatched in comparable post-socialist and late industrial cities. And after decades of decline, such programs are now yielding success. In 2021, the multinational corporation ArcelorMittal announced that it would invest over €1 billion to make Eisenhüttenstadt one of the world’s first carbon-neutral steel manufacturing sites by 2050—a move that both reflects and enables the city’s newly imagined longevity.

My research examines how governments’ response to perceived crises—climate change, migration, economic change—shapes public understandings about how best to weather a precarious future. In Eisenhüttenstadt, I posit that city officials are able to reinvigorate civic engagement and civic pride by effectively mobilizing the city’s socialist legacy of collectivist ethics. As state and private actors work together to reduce the city’s carbon footprint and renovate decaying urban infrastructures, the sense of collective endeavor integral to socialist urban planning emerges in a new form. Installing solar energy panels draws on a concern for future generations; welcoming asylum seekers fulfills the socialist promise of solidarity with one’s fellow man; demolitions consolidate residential space and foster the serendipitous encounters that strengthen community. These frameworks eclipse the narrative that spatial, population, and economic shrinkage inevitably bring only loss and decline, and position contemporary developments as part of a new iteration of urban utopia.

Image: Lindenallee, formerly Leninallee, undated postcard, courtesy of Detleff J.