Industrial "Socialist Cities" of East Germany in the Thirty Years of System Transformation (1989-2019)

The main aim of the article is to characterise development processes occurring in the so-called industrial socialist cities in the area of East Germany during three decades of post-socialist system transformation (1989-2019). This characteristics is based on analyses covering the most important centres that were created or developed during the period of intensive industrialisation of the German Democratic Republic until 1989 (Eisenhuttenstadt, Hoyerswerda, Schwedt on the Oder, Halle-Neustadt), and after the reunification of Germany in 1990 they followed the path of very complex transformation changes. The article focuses on changes in the economic structure of the cities in close relation to their effects in the demographic and structural-spatial aspect. In the analyses carried out for the aim of the study, were used source materials in the form of databases published by German institutions of official statistics and public digital spatial data sets. These data were compiled by mathematical-statistical and cartometric methods. The article ends with conclusions indicating the intensive, long-term processes of shrinking and peripheralisation of studied industrial "socialist cities" from the GDR period.