Eisenhüttenstadt is a city located at the river Oder, in the very east of Brandenburg. It was built only in the 1950s as a residential town for the employees of the huge steelworks there, the "Eisenhüttenkombinat" (EKO Steel). It became a socialist model city, which was initially called "Stalinstadt" in honour of Stalin. After Stalin was no longer so popular because of its numerous misdemeanours, it was renamed "Eisenhüttenstadt" as part of the de-stalinization process. The city grew very quickly to over 50,000 inhabitants by the end of the 80s. After the collapse of the GDR, a rapid decline began after 12,000 employees were made redundant as part of the privatization of the steelworks. To date, the population of the city has more than halved and despite the demolition of numerous prefabricated buildings, there are still many empty buildings and testimonies of an originally much larger city. The continuing trend towards population decline was only briefly interrupted by the arrival of many war refugees in 2015. The steelworks is still the dominant employer, but now belongs to a large Luxembourg steel group. The cityscape is characterized by socialist classicism and prefabricated buildings. The city still has a reputation of a loser of the German re-unification, which is why, despite clearly visible restoration measures in the inner city and the beautiful surrounding countryside, it is unlikely that the city will flourish in the near future.