After buying a ghost town in the middle of nowhere, the new owner has to come up with a plan. The idea of privatizing property on this scale is a relatively new spatial phenomenon, which is exciting. Redeveloping a city that used to give home to 5,000 people with private money, is quite a job. According to the auction committee the new buyer can do whatever he or she wants with the area, as long as he will stick to the local environmental and building rules.

Taking a close watch at the history of housing and the principles of human settlement, it will be immensely difficult to attract people to live here. There are no services and no other people, and there is no particular promise or story. Therefore I think housing will not work here. Pure recreation will not work either since there is no special attractor in the close environment, apart from a river and a small lake.

A Comparable Situation

On the island of Rügen in the German East Sea, people currently try to redevelop the ruins of the ‘Kolos von Prora’ into recreational apartments. The 4.5 kilometers long ruin was once meant to facilitate the need for recreation and family holidays in Hitler’s ‘Drittes Reich’, but never made it to complete utilization. The massive series of buildings by architect Clemens Klotz finally ended up being used as a military centre during the DDR regime. For years plans have been made to transform these ruins into apartments, but all ideas dramatically failed. The non-official and above all personal notification about the reason of this failure is the extreme boringness of the island Rügen itself. There is no single reason to go there unless you are a +65 ‘Ossie’.

Speculating further about the future opportunities of Skrunda-1, I believe an entertainment program combined with permanent recreational housing and temporary holiday rental will be the most profitable function (and that’s what we’re looking for here). Therefore a big attractor is needed. Marketing guru Seth Godin once suggested in a TED lecture that building the biggest lava lamp would already be enough to attract people to visit. “It has to be remarkable”, Godin states when he explains his ‘Purple Cow Theory’. Some remarkable assets are already present in Skrunda-1. Especially its historical relics are fascinating and appealing to many — radar systems, Soviet army and mysterious Cold War secrets. Knowing this story and looking at the pictures of the inspiring abandoned spaces on Flickr, this area reminds me of a level in the online first person shooter Wolfenstein Enemy Territory. This analogy could be very interesting when redeveloping this area. Think of a Cold War theme park, facilitating real life Cold War experiences such as the biggest paintball playground combined with Emscher Landschaftspark-like landscapes.