Redefining the “Workers’ Paradise”

For this episode of Heritage Hour we are in Nowa Huta, an industrial city which was built as a workers’ neighbourhood in the socialist-realist style in the late 1940s, acting as a proletarian counterweight to the seemingly snobbish and intellectual city of Kraków. Over seven decades later, and Nowa Huta’s sprawling steelworks have all but disappeared, the district is one of the greenest in Kraków, and new challenges await. While the city is on the Polish historical monuments register (designated as a pomnik historii), it now has a chance to promote itself further by applying to UNESCO. But is such a heritage label what Nowa Huta really wants, or needs? John Beauchamp and Katarzyna Jagodzińska meet with two experts from Nowa Huta to discuss its very phenomenon. Katarzyna Kobylarczyk, a local journalist, author and social archivist, as well as Jarosław Klaś, Director of the Norwid Cultural Centre in Nowa Huta.