Gottfried Feder, Die neue Stadt (Nazi Settlement Doctrine)

Core idea

Doctrine for mass-producing standardised small agrarian towns of around 20,000 people to decentralise the Reich

Why it matters

A völkisch, anti-metropolitan counter-lineage to garden-city decentralisation, though it had little real policy effect

Description

Published in 1939 by the National Socialist economist Gottfried Feder, then professor of settlement policy at the Technische Hochschule Berlin, Die neue Stadt set out a doctrine for a network of standardised 'new cities' of roughly 20,000 to 50,000 inhabitants to be mass-produced across supposedly under-populated lands. Each town was conceived as a self-sufficient unit with communal facilities, integrated green space, traditional architecture and a fixed population ceiling, expressing a völkisch ideal of rooted community. Feder condemned metropolitan growth, finance capital and modernist architecture, proposing instead a technocratically planned, agrarian and decentralised settlement structure for the Greater German Reich.

Significance

The doctrine matters as the dark, blood-and-soil counterpart to garden-city and decentralisation thinking, recasting anti-urban ideas within National Socialist racial ideology and eastward colonisation. In practice it had little influence: the regime prioritised rearmament and autarky, and the book was largely ignored. It survives chiefly as evidence of how planning ideals could be absorbed into authoritarian and expansionist projects.

What became of it

Essentially unrealised: published 1939, the scheme exerted no discernible policy influence as the regime prioritised rearmament and autarky, and the eastern settlement programme it imagined never materialised.

Critique

Scholars characterise it as a reactionary, anti-urban garden city in Nazi dress whose agrarian nostalgia was tied to expansionist Lebensraum ideology.

What shaped it

• Fascism (1922–1945)
• Garden Cities of To-Morrow (1898 / 1902)
• Nationalism (late 18th–19th c.)
• The garden suburb (1903)

Sources

• https://germanhistorydocs.org/en/nazi-germany-1933-1945/gottfried-feder-the-new-city-1939
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Feder
• https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-32056-9_5