Representing communism: Discourses of heritage tourism and economic regeneration in Nowa Huta, Poland

This geographical case study of the 'new town' of Nowa Huta -- a Soviet-financed district of Krakow built for Poland's largest steelworks and its workers in the 1950s -- explores the nature of the representations of place produced for tourist consumption, and the relationship of those representations to local, neoliberalizing discourses of economic regeneration. My project identifies ways in which space is opened for producing and circulating alternative discourses about Nowa Huta that challenge its dominant representation as a dreary urban wasteland and a failed social experiment. Implicit in this ideological battle for control of space is a much larger issue that resonates through all post-socialist countries: how the communist past is reframed to support specific representations of national identity. With promotional materials produced for tourists and transcripts from commercial tours, I employ textual and discourse analysis to identify the themes and narratives through which tourism professionals represent the communist past: the struggle for economic and religious self-determination the "Othering" of the residents by bourgeois Cracovians and the ideological connection of the urban ensemble to British and American ideals of city planning. I argue that the interpretation of these urban landscapes is constantly in flux, thereby promoting very different histories of Nowa Huta than its founders envisioned.Nowa Huta, conceived as the Polish 'ideal city of socialism,' was a tourist attraction from the beginning, drawing architects and planners to see how the tenets of socialist planning could be given architectural form. Since the fall of communism, however, it has suffered from unemployment, lack of investment, and a tarnished image due to its associations with the repudiated communist regime. In the last several years, local entrepreneurs have begun to organize tours for Western visitors eager to see beyond the mass-market tourism of Krakow's Old Town and other nearby sites, and local residents, dismayed by the image of their district in the popular imagination, have begun to find new ways of rebuilding its reputation.This project makes an important contribution to understanding political, cultural, and economic transitions in post-socialist countries. The heritage of communism imposes particular constraints on the ongoing political project of constructing identities at multiple scales -- local, national, and European. On one hand, the material remains of communism potentially could contribute to significant economic growth in the tourism sector in post-socialist countries. On the other hand, this case study makes clear the desires of the state (at multiple scales) to marginalize emphasis on the communist period in order to forge new national identities and to attract global capital. Understanding the congruence (or lack thereof) between tourist-driven entrepreneurship, local (grassroots) identity formation, and economic development activity is essential in assessing the long-term viability of communist heritage tourism, and indeed, the potential for these states to rise out of positions of marginality within the European Union and within the global economy.