Hoyerswerda: The Shrinking City

Stefan Boness

Hoyerswerda stands for radical upheavals in German society and urban development. With its ten huge housing estates in the pre-fab slab style, it was once the showcase metropolis of East Germany and the socialist model of a modern functional city. Today this image of a city charged with utopia seems utterly unrealistic. Throughout Germany, Hoyerswerda is branded as being particularly ugly and decrepit. Once the city with the most children in East Germany, twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall it is on the verge of becoming a dying city. In statistical terms, it is the fastest-shrinking city in Germany. With the demolition of entire estates, Hoyerswerda has already changed fundamentally and has now become a model for the urban restructuring of a shrinking city. Hoyerswerda – Die Schrumpfende Stadt (Hoyerswerda: The Shrinking City) presents the post-socialist urban landscape as a symbol of the radical social transformations at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Stefan Boness