Discover History

History up to 1990

The first plans for a housing estate on this site date back to 1919, and involved the building of flats for workers in the industrial areas of Altchemnitz and Siegmar-Schönau. From the late 1950s, urban development plans envisaged that the city would expand along Stollberger Strasse to the south. Work began in 1972 on the section known as construction area 0 – Irkutsker Strasse. The 2,400 flats were used to test the logistics of industrial housing construction, which were later applied on a larger scale to eight further sites.

The foundation stone for the Fritz Heckert residential district was officially laid in October 1974, as part of the celebrations of the 25th anniversary of the GDR.

Densification and the expansion of the plans from seven to eight construction zones led to the creation of 32,300 flats by 1990, housing approximately 90,000 people. In terms of population, this was the second largest inner-city development in the GDR after the Marzahn-Hellersdorf area in Berlin. The political revolution in 1989/1990 brought construction to a halt and the area remained unfinished. It had been planned to build 42,300 flats for 116,000 residents.

The housing estate, which extended 4.5 kilometres to the north and south and involved construction costs of 2.7 billion East German marks, was part of a complex urban planning scheme that provided all the facilities necessary for daily life.

In 1980, the Karl-Marx-Stadt city boundary was adjusted to incorporate the 107 hectares of Neukirchen, enabling additional flats to be built in the Hutholz district. The newest residential district, Hutholz-Süd, is also known as the “Heckert balcony” due to ist peripheral location and views of the distant Ore Mountains.

 

The Fritz Heckert residential district has benefited from various federal- and state-funded urban development programmes since 1994. As of 2023, it had received over €80 million in funding, with the city of Chemnitz contributing at least one third of this sum. Funding for enhancements to the area and measures to address the chal-lenges presented by changing de-mographics, climate change and de-creased functionality resulting from lower inhabitant numbers will continue to be pro-vided by the EU, the federal government, the state and the city of Chemnitz until 2028. The district is now an attractive place to live, and offers a good quality of life.

From 1994, funding initially concentrated on densification and the delivery of infra-structure through the “Urban development of large new development areas” pro-gramme. The development of the housing estate was soon hampered by the exodus of young people and growing vacancy rates, with residential buildings up to 50% unoccupied.

Agreements between large housing com-panies and the city ensured that buildings were vacated in an orderly fashion and that residents received support through social compensation schemes. With €38 million in funding from the urban redevelopment pro-gramme, almost 11,000 flats in the area were demolished. Further funding of ap-prox. €3 million enabled the systematic ad-aptation of social and technical infrastruc-ture. This enabled new green spaces and open areas to be created, providing breath-ing spaces within the district.

Since 2006, urban development strategies have been developed and delivered with the participation of local residents. A stateof- the-art redesign of pedestrian zones im-proved residents’ quality of life. Nurseries and schools have been refurbished, creat-ing good environments for supervision and teaching. 2007 saw funding eared more towards the social needs of people in the area, through pilot schemes and ESF-funded projects (European Social Fund). As of 2023, up to €40 million of funding had been invested in urban and area-specific social development.