Dimitrovgrad, Bulgaria, Europe
 
 
Year1947latitude: 42° 30'
longitude: 25° 34'
Period
Initiator(s)Municipalities/National Government
Planning organizationYouth Brigades who came to build their dream town
Nationality initiator(s)Bulgarian
Designer(s) / Architect(s)Lyuben Tonev
Petar Tashev
Design organization
Inhabitants45,591 (2022)
Target population
Town websitehttp://dimitrovgrad.bg
Town related links
Literature

type of New Town: > scale of autonomy
New-Town-in-Town
Satellite
New Town
Company Town
> client
Private Corporation
Public Corporation
> policy
Capital
Decentralization
Industrialization
Resettlement
Economic
 

Dimitrovgrad
source: dimitrovgrad.bg



Socialist house construction (1950)
source: Brunnbauer,U.(2005)"The Town of the Youth”: Dimitrovgrad and Bulgarian Socialism"in Ethnologia Balkanica 09:91-114, LI



Dimitrovgrad today
source: https://bnr.bg/en/post/10 1695775/dimitrovgrad-mark s-its-75th-anniversary


Plan Tonev
source: ATRIUM Archive


Dimitrovgrad was created on 2 September 1947 by a decree of the then prime minister and party leader Georgi Dimitrov, merging the villages of Rakovski, Mariino and Chernokoniovo. In 1941 a firm built a new industrial complex by buying an existing coal mine nearby. After 1944 the Communists also used the complex and continued to expand it with new factories. Soon the surrounding village population could no longer supply enough workers so a decision was made for a new town to be built.
Construction started in 1947 and in the following years, hundreds of thousands of young people, brigade members, workers and construction troops from all over the country went to build the town and factories. The construction of Dimitrovgrad was when brigades and brigade movements in Bulgaria started as all students and workers had to work as volunteers for the Republic, mostly as builders and in agriculture. Dimitrovgrad was the symbol of Socialist Bulgaria – the newest town, the town of the communists. Every official delegation visited the town, representatives from the capital attended all the official celebrations. "This was also the town where imposing the new political order was more intense than anywhere else in the country – the population was mostly young and impressionable people, far from their parents and established traditions so they were the first ones to adopt the new regime."
"The aim of the designers was to create an urban centre with a monumental and powerful architectural image. They combined urban planning and the architectural ideas of European modernism with “socialist classicism” imposed by the Soviet Union. According to the concept of functional zoning, the “garden city” of Dimitrovgrad is divided into a town centre, residential complexes (such as the “Third of March” Complex), park areas (such as the “Penyo Penev” Memorial Park) and an industrial zone."

source: https://nonument.org/nonuments/dimitrovgrad/ tekst by Aneliya Ivanova

Brunnbauer,U.(2005)"The Town of the Youth”: Dimitrovgrad and Bulgarian Socialism"in Ethnologia Balkanica 09:91-114, LIT Verlag

http://www.atriumroute.eu/heritage/sites/dimitrovgrad

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