New Towns

New Towns as materialisations of their era.

New Towns are expressions of utopia: they were intended to eliminate housing shortage in war-torn Europe, provide living space for large-scale industrialisation projects and implement a modern lifestyle. At the same time, they were representations of authority and spatial control.
However, due to structural and social change, new cities age more rapidly than other towns. While some cities were demolished, other New Towns have been reconstructed as cultural heritage sites or rebuilt in other places. The contributions making up this book describe the transformational process of the New Town since 1945 up to this day – with examples from France, Great Britain, Albania, Poland, Hungary, Israel and China – as well as focussing on the urban and historical authenticity of these new cities and their innate histories.


Andreas Ludwig works as a historian at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam. His main areas of research are material culture, museum collecting and everyday life in contemporary history. For some years he has focussed his attention on the history of Berlin and the New Town of Eisenhüttenstadt.