Dunaújváros

Country: Hungary
Year founded: 1950
Planned population: ca. 60,000 (initial estimates ranged from 20,000–45,000 in the early 1950s)
Current population: ca. 41,000
Purpose: first socialist model town; built for the workers of a massive iron and steel plant
Special feature: “If the factory lives, the city lives.”

Rising from the former village of Dunapentele, Dunaújváros was founded in 1950 as Hungary’s first socialist city—a showcase of heavy industry and collective life built around the country’s largest steelworks. Once called Sztálinváros, it embodied post-war optimism and social equality. After 1989, deindustrialisation, unemployment, and outmigration reshaped the city, leaving both pride and loss in its wake. Today, amid decaying factories and new cultural projects, residents and artists are reclaiming its complex heritage, turning the “city of steel” into a space of memory and renewal.

Avtor: New Towns New Narratives Network