Urban Planning in Nazi Germany has won the Architects' Company Book Award 2025 in the 'History' category

ARL International ARL International
published on 09/12/2025
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The book explores how urban planning under National Socialism became an instrument of power, exclusion, and war. What role did it play compared to other authoritarian regimes in Europe between 1933 and 1945? 

The publication: Urban Planning in Nazi Germany. Attack, triumph, terror in the European context 1933–1945.

Edited by Harald Bodenschatz, Victoria Grau, Christiane Post and Max Welch Guerra, this volume places Nazi urban development in a European comparative context alongside other contemporary dictatorships, a topic that has received little attention to date.

The authors of the book “Urban Planning in Nazi Germany” come from several countries (Chile, Germany, and Italy), represent various disciplines (architecture and planning sociology, urban planning, art history, urban studies, and political science), and represent different generations. The English-language edition, “Urban Planning in Nazi Germany,” received the 2025 Architecture Book Award in the History category on November 27, 2025, in London. This award was presented by the World Architecture Festival (Miami), the Temple Bar Trust, and The Architects' Company (London).

Category: History

Winner: Urban Planning in Nazi Germany, edited by Harald Bodenschatz, Victoria Grau, Christiane Post and Max Welch Guerra (DOM Publishers)

The expert jury's reasoning:

Perhaps not an obvious topic for a prize-winning book, this huge and impressively edited volume describes in a clear straightforward manner the full gamut of urban planning under Hitler’s regime. Part of a series of similar studies into mid-20th century totalitarianism, it is both exhaustive and terrifying in equal measure. It is commendable that these German scholars were willing to look at this dark historical period with such rigour and candour: other nations should likewise be scrutinising their own unsavoury built heritage.

Judges: Murray Frazer, Simon Henley, Cindy Walters

Book cover titled “Urban Planning in Nazi Germany – Attack, triumph, terror in the European context 1933–1945,” edited by Harald Bodenschatz, Victoria Grau, Christiane Post, and Max Welch Guerra. Below the title, a historical black-and-white photograph shows a landscape with a highway cutting through fields and forests, with a village visible in the foreground.
DOM Publishers