| The re-ordering of the post-communist states' and societies' “worlds of meaning” after 1989 has also entailed a profound re-ordering of their geographies, material as well as symbolic. The focus of such re-positionings has centred, above all, on Europe. The past decade has been marked, indeed, by the question of these states' “return to Europe”—both in institutional as well as metaphorical terms. This thesis looks to the ways in which one post-communist city—Krakow, Poland's past royal capital—has attempted to assert its new place in the global economy and within an integrating Europe. I examine, in particular, the ways in which the urban development strategies of Krakow's leaders over the past decade have been structured around a re-valorisation and promotion of its cultural heritage, seen as the path both to market success as well as the means by which to fully reclaim the city's identity and locate it firmly within the European cultural sphere. This examination allows me to highlight some of the ways in which local political-economic decision making in the transition continues to be marked by deeper questions of identity and belonging. It also reveals some of the ways in which urban politics in postcommunist cities is inevitably informed by broader geo-political and geo-economic meta-narratives, specifying appropriate forms of economic regulation and political governance for cities “in-transition”. |
