Eisenhuttenstadt

Eisenhüttenstadt, on the Oder river in eastern Brandenburg, was East Germany's first planned "new town," built from 1950 as the model socialist city under the GDR's Sixteen Principles of Urban Development. Founded to house workers for the adjacent state steelworks (Eisenhüttenkombinat Ost), it was named Stalinstadt in 1953 and only took its current name in 1961, when it merged with the older towns of Fürstenberg (Oder) and Schönfließ. Its historic town centre is therefore not a medieval old town but a planned socialist-realist ensemble — a cultural centre, town hall, schools, and a main boulevard of department stores, designed as a showcase of GDR urban planning. Population peaked around 53,000 in the 1980s and has since declined sharply with East Germany's post-reunification industrial contraction.

Eisenhüttenstadt is reachable by regional train and by road from Berlin and Frankfurt (Oder), lying close to the Polish border along the Oder.

The planned town centre is compact and designed to be walkable, with its main boulevard connecting residential districts.

The town's core attraction is its planned socialist-realist architecture — the 1950s civic ensemble of town hall, cultural centre, and main boulevard built as a GDR model city — along with the Dokumentationszentrum Alltagskultur der DDR (documentation centre on everyday GDR life), which chronicles Stalinstadt/Eisenhüttenstadt's history as East Germany's first planned town.

Walking the planned town centre and visiting the GDR everyday-culture documentation centre are the main organised activities.

• Berlin — Germany's capital city, reachable by regional train
• Nearby towns in Brandenburg — explore the surrounding region