Selling Socialist Realism: Identity, Community and the Uses of Heritage in Post-Socialist Poland

This paper explores the remaking of the town of Nowa Huta in southern Poland. Constructed as Poland’s first socialist city centred on the (then) Lenin Steelworks, yet also critical to the opposition movements which toppled socialism in Poland, Nowa Huta offers fascinating opportunities for exploring notions of working class identity and community in a socialist and post-socialist context. Using archive materials and stories from interviews in Nowa Huta, the paper narrates and analyses key events in the town’s history and explores both internal and external representations of the community. This historical context is used as the basis for considering the contemporary challenges posed by the restructuring and privatization of the steelworks and the wider transformation of Polish society. In the second part of the paper, I explore the current and potential uses of Nowa Huta’s particular heritage in shaping the community’s future and in finding ways of avoiding the problems of deprivation and exclusion identified in industrial communities in the West. This discussion is developed in the context of Western work on heritage and community regeneration, which explicitly deals with questions of inclusion, exclusion and development.

Paper presented to ESRC Seminar on Accessing Identity: Identity and Urban Regeneration, University of Hull, 25th September 2002

A Powerpoint version of this paper is available here.