Learning—and Not Learning—from Nazi Urban Planning

The Nazis used urban and spatial planning to strengthen their colonization of the invaded eastern territories. German-Aryan populations were to be placed in the European East as human “walls” or ramparts to protect the “inland empire.” Reichsminister for the Occupied Eastern Territories Alfred Rosenberg advocated “strategic border-fortification,” and so the hard task of embedding the best of Germanic colonizing populations right next to the Slavic edge would be key. Urban re-formation policies emerged from, not alongside, Nazi racial de-formation policies. The transformation of the Nazi Lebensraum across Eastern Europe was wholly contingent upon the displacement of Jews into their own “death-space”-- alternative city-anatomies for urban modernity: ghettos, slave labor camps, concentration camps, and death camps. Urban form itself was changed.

One way in which the borderlands of the Third Reich were be fortified was through the colonizing “central place theory” of geographer Walter Christaller. I will discuss the degree to which this concept may be considered a transferable, “empty” vessel of midcentury rational space planning. Does it not appear to have suited its ethnic cleansing task only too well? What are the postwar lessons learned, and not learned, from planning models such as Christaller’s? The geopolitical border-strengthening of Christaller’s central place theory was adopted by Israeli planners in the 1950s, when they placed a hierarchical system of villages and cities up against the border with Lebanon or near the southern end of the West Bank. Geographer Arnon Golan has called this the “dark side” of (central place) planning; nonetheless it was deemed “light” enough to get Nazi planners off the hook for war crimes. Just how innocently transferable are such planning techniques; and, more broadly, what are the intersections between planning, context, and ideology?