Socialist economy of space (working titel)
Territory and planning in the GDR, 1960-1980

PhD Project by Charlotta Cordes

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Susanne Schattenberg  and Prof. Dr. Kerstin Brückweh

Since the 'end of history', capitalist territories seem to have become a timeless normality. However, today's tools to reflect on state space are anything but ahistorical.

The research project examines the state space in the GDR: its concept, its genesis and its practice. It follows its designers, exegetes and implementers to their desks and drawing boards, to their planning offices, meeting rooms and object locations of the 1960s and 1970s.

The study argues that in the 1960s GDR a specific concept of space was developed. It was based on the attempt of finding a way to deal with the structural contradiction between production and its general preconditions within the state socialist system. In this context, territorial space served as an instrument for analysing, organising and controlling societal processes. Planners were supposed to shape those processes both economically efficient and spatially harmonised. Indeed, they had to deal with this assignment on a daily basis.

The research project combines approaches from cultural and spatial history. Space serves as both object and method. On the one hand, it is about the space conceived and planned from a state perspective. The object of enquiry is thus ideas and practices related to state space. On the other hand, space acts as a means of gaining knowledge. As a heuristic term, the concept of 'territoriality' is used. It addresses the changing societal and culturally specific approaches of ruling actors to state space in modernity.

The period covered by the study is based on the history of the concept. It begins in the early 1960s in the run-up to the economic reforms. At that time, territorial planning developed from an idea of socialist spatial planners to a project of the GDR's highest planning commission. The story ends in the course of the 1970s, when territoriality took on the institutionalised form that remained until the end of the GDR.