From its inception in the aftermath of the Second World War, the East German city, Eisenhüttenstadt, was conceptualized and heralded as an alternative to industrial capitalist urbanism. The planners and architects of the socialist model-city, who ensured that residents’ housing provided “all the amenities of urban living” oriented toward the “social, cultural, and societal centers” of the city, understood their designs explicitly in contrast to the isolation and misery bred by suburbs and tenement housing (69). In this way, Eisenhüttenstadt was a utopian socialist project. Though rife with contradictions in implementation, its imagined alternatives represented a strident critique of the urban capitalist present. Yet what happens to an ideological utopian experiment when the political, economic, social, and cultural context is fundamentally transformed? In The Afterlife of Utopia: Urban Renewal in Germany’s Model Socialist City, Samantha Maurer Fox expertly excavates this entanglement between social and material urban space in Eisenhüttenstadt, arguing that the durability of socialist urbanism can serve as a foundation for reimaginings of human flourishing fit for withstanding the challenges of our own present.

Fox’s work is animated by the deep urgency of our late-industrial present, and she provides a theoretically rigorous framework to suggest how anthropology and related disciplines can offer analytical solutions alongside postmortems. Ecological economics, for example, reconciles “a desire for the recuperation of socialist collectivism with the need to accept the intractability of global capitalism” (7). Whereas both capitalist and socialist urbanisms measure success by growth, Fox emphasizes the need for new models of governance that reframe success as improving quality of life without unbridled depletion of the earth’s resources. Fox also contributes to scholarly conversations on “postcities” and challenges us to rethink the periodization of “late socialism” as an analog of “late capitalism” and “late industrialism,” instead. This terminology “creates a conceptual space needed to acknowledge that some forms of radical experimentation within the confines of capitalism … can be read as manifestations of socialism’s continued effectual force” (21). Here Eisenhüttenstadt may have something to teach us.

Based on extensive archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, the monograph explores the durability of socialism in the material and urban spaces of Eisenhüttenstadt across a series of six thematic chapters that mediate between cultural history and contemporary urban development. The first chapter lays the historical groundwork by chronicling the founding Eisenhüttenkombinat Ost (EKO) and its city, which provided the perfect incubator for further development of the East German architectural emic. Chapter 2, in turn, examines how city planners and municipal leaders drew selectively on the competent legacies of socialist urbanism to weather the challenges of shrinkage in the 2000s and on. As with other former East German industrial cities, the privatization process and resulting unemployment initiated a wave of outmigration from the city that wrought deleterious effects upon the urban landscape. Although EKO survived in diminished capacity, by the turn of the millennium, the city center was materially decrepit and up to 23 percent of the city’s housing stock stood vacant. In their plans for demolition of peripheral housing and revitalization of the city center, Fox shows how city planners revived the socialist architectural emic to reorient their citizens toward the heart of the city, thus nurturing civic and communal engagement, just as the original socialist architects had intended. These efforts have met with tangible success in the form of several awards from the Berlin-Brandenburg Housing Association for meeting climate and demographic changes in innovative ways (detailed in chapter 4).

Afterlife is an apt metaphor for understanding the postsocialist transformations in Eisenhüttenstadt because the built environment, people, and social and cultural sensibilities of socialism have continued to live on well after the state as a political entity ceased to exist. The middle chapters of the book examine different facets of these continuities. The third chapter captures the contours of a city-wide debate on street renaming that altered the material and semiotic landscape of the city while also alienating residents who bore the bureaucratic burden of these changes. While many socialist-era names continue to exist, they evoke different sociopolitical meanings in the context of the Federal Republic. Chapter 4 likewise traces the longevity of a socialist concept by examining the origins and transformations of Eisenhüttenstadt’s two real estate companies and the ongoing conceptualization of housing as a social concern (soziale Frage). Fox demonstrates that the creative solution these companies reached to remain solvent while maintaining a commitment to urban space as a public good was possible precisely because of their socialist origins. Chapter 5 draws most explicitly on Fox’s extensive fieldwork in Eisenhüttenstadt to investigate how residents sought to sustain and create new social infrastructures after the collapse of the East German state. This chapter is inflected with the ambivalence of many postsocialist narratives of communal change; alongside the loss of tight-knit House Societies and the difficulties of accommodating waves of asylum seekers, there are efforts at self-organization and the revival of Eastern bloc traditions like the collective volunteer work party of the Subbotnik. In these ways, Fox’s book is an integral contribution to a body of scholarship on postsocialism that challenges the primacy of 1989/1990 as an absolute rupture, instead making space for the afterlife of socialist practices on new configurations of material and social life.

Fox’s final chapter and conclusion return to some of the ideas articulated in the introduction, showing how contemporary Eisenhüttenstadt has strived to improve human flourishing while diminishing resource extraction in concrete and replicable ways. Fox details, for example, how increasing the density of urban living decreases throughput and thus reduces energy expenditure, as well as how the city uses recycled gas byproducts of the steel manufacturing process as a heating source. This chapter also circles back to the relationship between the city and its steel mill. In 2021, ArcelorMittal (the company that now owns what was once EKO) announced that it plans to transition its factories in Eisenhüttenstadt and Bremen into the first carbon-neutral steel manufacturing facilities in the world by 2050. For all the uncertainties that have faced the steel industry since 1990, this news seems to secure Eisenhüttenstadt’s near future. But is this obligate symbiosis between steel factory and city, as Fox suggests, a devil’s bargain? Given the city’s own goal of carbon neutrality and the precarity of German industry writ large, perhaps so. Although Eisenhüttenstadt’s second iteration of utopian urbanism is not without its own internal contradictions, the city nonetheless exhibits the powerful potential of reimagining socialist urbanisms for the present. Ultimately, The Afterlife of Utopia is a hopeful and necessary accounting of the durability of socialist utopian impulses and a poignant call to action for new imaginations of urban thriving in our scholarship, our communities and governments, and our everyday lives.