Samantha Maurer Fox

SAMANTHA FOX, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, received a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship in September 2023 to aid research and writing on “The Afterlife of Utopia: Urban Renewal in Germany’s Model Socialist City.” “The Afterlife of Utopia” is a multi-modal ethnographic monograph that examines Eisenhüttenstadt, a city along the German-Polish border founded in 1950 as Stalinstadt, a steel manufacturing hub and showcase for socialist urbanism. During the East German era, the city thrived. During the 1990s, it lost over half its population as the steelworks cut its workforce. Yet municipal leaders were able to preserve their real estate holdings and subsequently implement large-scale efforts in urban renewal. Carried out over the course of the 2010s, these projects were explicitly inspired by the collectivist ethics of the city’s founding moment, representing both a novel recuperation of socialist history and an innovative model of sustainable shrinkage. “The Afterlife of Utopia” draws on archival and ethnographic research to trace this history, showing how contemporary architects and urban planners have reimagined their city amidst contemporary challenges and demographic change. In 2024, the European Parliament granted €1.3 billion to transform Eisenhüttenstadt into 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.