In a recent article published by BBC Travel, we can read about Krakow’s Nowa Huta neighbourhood, the “city that went from communism to capitalism”. 

The news outlet draws attention to this specific Polish city built in the aftermath of WWII in a Socialist Realist fashion. Nowa Huta was aimed to be an ideal, a utopian city from which other Polish cities could get inspiration.  

The author of the book Unfinished Utopia (2013) Katherine Lebow describes Nowa Huta as a “planned city that didn’t really work out the way anybody expected”. 

“The planners themselves – some of Poland’s leading architects and urban planners of the day – received no direct instructions on how the city should look. However, knowing that the city was meant to be an urban ideal, their design emphasised parks and spacious apartments and ensured that every block had all the services it would need – Lebow wrote. 

Until recently, remained like an outside museum of mid-20th century communism. However, locals managed to capitalise on this aesthetically questionable heritage in order to make the neighbourhood a touristic attraction. 

„Nowa Huta is an increasingly attractive place to live,” Mateusz Marchocki, English-language guide at the Promotion of Nowa Huta Foundation, told the BBC. He added that “Nowa Huta is now seeing restaurants, cafés, ice cream shops, and food trucks emerge to entertain the city’s population.”

The city offers a sort of snapshot of communism as it once was. „Young [Poles] nowadays have no idea what it was like,” explained Marchocki. Stepping into parts of Nowa Huta is like stepping into the worlds of their parents and grandparents (…)”

“As one of only two planned and built Socialist Realist settlements in the world, besides Magnitogorsk deep in Russia’s interior, Nowa Huta is something different from the bland modernism and grey brutalism usually associated with Eastern European socialism” – the BBC writes.  

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Nowa Huta became a stronghold of the Solidarity movement, which would eventually lead to the peaceful overthrowing of communism in the country. As BBC puts it, “the city remains a living symbol, but not the one it was meant to be.”

Cover photo: Twitter @YIMBYPoland