EisenhüttenSTADT IM UMBAU: Imagining New Futures in a Post-Socialist City

SAMANTHA FOX, while a graduate student at Columbia University, New York, New York, was awarded a grant in April 2014 to aid research on 'Eisenhüttenstadt, IM UMBAU: Imagining New Futures in a Post-Socialist City,' supervised by Dr. Brian Larkin. The grantee spent sixteen months living in Eisenhüttenstadt, a city on the border between Germany and Poland founded in 1950 as a socialist utopian project. Originally called Stalinstadt, the city was planned as a steel manufacturing hub and worker's paradise. Its products would power the rise of urban centers across East Germany and its design would be a model of humane urban living. Until 1989, Eisenhüttenstadt thrived. Today, it suffers from urban blight and shifting demographics as young people leave for better lives elsewhere. At the same time, state actors and private contractors are imprinting on the city a new utopianism as they transform it into a new urban paradigm: an environmentally sustainable city that caters to an aging and shrinking population. The grantee conducted ethnographic research in Eisenhüttenstadt and archival research in Eisenhüttenstadt, Potsdam, and Berlin. The resulting dissertation asks how urban futures can be imagined when traditional engines of growth disappear. Ultimately, the study investigates how residents and city officials in Eisenhüttenstadt draw on the material and social history in which they dwell to regain hope and revitalize their city.