Prize for European Administrative History 2025

The “Prize for European Administrative History”, endowed by Prof. emeritus Erk Volkmar Heyen (University of Greifswald), honours outstanding research by early‑career scholars. The prize combines recognition of completed academic work with support for an innovative new research project. The award will be decided by a jury chaired by Peter Collin (MPIlht).

The 2025/26 award goes to Dr Cosima Götz, in recognition of her doctoral dissertation “Metropolises in Competition: Urban Planning and Urban Societies, 1890–1940”, published by Wallstein Verlag. The study takes as its point of departure the widely shared conviction around 1900 that societal futures were to be shaped in and through urban space. In this context, international urban planning competitions emerged as a key instrument. Employed by both municipal and state administrations, this procedure experienced an unparalleled heyday between the 1890s and the 1930s. It promised nothing less than a “general plan” – for transport infrastructure, built and open spaces, and, crucially, for the social reorganisation of society under the conditions of a time understood as “modern”. In “Metropolises in Competition”, Cosima Götz reconstructs the history of planning competitions for Berlin (1908–1910), Canberra (1911–12), Paris (1919–20) and Ankara (1927–1929) as a vivid transnational social and intellectual history spanning five formative decades. Drawing on a wide range of sources – including numerous visual materials – she demonstrates how competitions transformed urban space into a contested terrain, and how attempts to resolve these conflicts generated ideas and instruments with far‑reaching consequences.

The research project supported by the prize, “The Future of the Past: Large‑Scale Housing Developments of the 1960s and 1970s in Augsburg and Bourges,” likewise addresses a cross‑border phenomenon that promised a hopeful future through the transformation of urban space. In the 1960s and 1970s, large housing estates gave European metropolises an entirely new appearance. Focusing on the Herrenbach district in Augsburg and the Chancellerie and Gibjoncs neighbourhoods in the central French city of Bourges, Augsburg’s partner city, the project examines the history of (Western) European large‑scale housing developments from the perspective of municipal administrations and their conduct within contemporary fields of actors. Its aim is to render the built environment legible as the product of processes of social negotiation and consensus‑building. The project title, “The Future of the Past”, is deliberately ambiguous: in the 1960s and 1970s, large housing estates were regarded as heralds of the future; in this sense, they represent “past futures”. At the same time, municipal administrations today face the challenge of developing long‑term strategies for dealing with the architectural, infrastructural, and sociocultural legacy of these estates – and of leaving their problematic aspects behind as a “future past” yet to be overcome.