Representing Communism: Discourses of Heritage Tourism and Economic Regeneration in Nowa Huta, Poland A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Judith Emily Otto IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Dr. Roger P. Miller, Adviser November 2008 © Judith Emily Otto 2008 Acknowledgements I am grateful for the inspiration, assistance and support of many people who have helped me along the way. First, my thanks to the faculty of the Salem State College English Department – Rod Kessler, Peter Walker, J.D. Scrimgeour, and Cindy Damon-Bach -- for rekindling my love of writing and scholarship. I am also grateful to Steve Matchak of the Geography Department and Chris Mauriello of the History Department, for their intellectual camaraderie on our trip to Central and Eastern Europe that “started it all.” I owe enormous debts to many people at the University of Minnesota: especially to my committee members, John Adams, Helga Leitner, and Tom Wolfe, for guiding my progress as a geographer, teacher, and scholar. My adviser, Roger Miller, deserves special thanks for his cheerful encouragement, collegial questioning, and unwavering support of this project. My fellow graduate students in GEOG 9001 offered friendship, advice, and wisdom; Tuesday evenings with Professor Leonard Polakiewicz gave me the Polish language skills I needed to make my dream of working abroad a reality: Sto lat! (May you all live one hundred years!) Professor Daphne Berdahl was the very model of the anthropological scholar; her gentle and expert guidance makes me miss her all the more. Many people in Kraków/Nowa Huta gave generously of their time and expertise, but special thanks are due to the staff and instructors of the Summer School for Language and Culture at Jagiellonian University; Jacek Purchla and Micha » Wi Ñniewski of the International Cultural Center; Micha » Ostrowski of Crazy Guides; and Marcin Moszczy ½ski of Cooltours. My research would not have been possible without financial support from the Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) program administered by the University of Minnesota; the Darrell Haug Davis Fellowship administered by the Geography Department; and the Myrna Smith International Traveling Fellowship from the Graduate School, for all of which I am immensely grateful. I am grateful to my parents, Victor and Emily Otto, for all their love and support, and for their gift of the desire to learn, bestowed at an early age. And last -- but never least -- my appreciation to my husband Brian Cacchiotti, for being my traveling companion, sounding board, and the best cheerleader ever, on our lifelong adventure together. i Abstract This geographical case study of the ‘new town’ of Nowa Huta – a Soviet-financed district of Kraków 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. ii Table of Contents Page List of Tables v List of Figures vi Part I – Foundations Chapter 1 – Introduction 1 Chapter 2 – Theoretical frameworks: placing communist heritage tourism research 14 Chapter 3 – Materials and methods: from texts to discourses 38 Part II – Tourism Rhetorics Chapter 4 – Form 60 Chapter 5 – Contesting space: work, faith, and identity 98 Chapter 6 – Difference 144 Part III - Economics Chapter 7 – The business of tourism 167 Chapter 8 – Promoting the past, selling the future: the discourses of economic regeneration 208 Part IV – Alternative Discourses, Future Possibilities Chapter 9 – Conclusions: reclaiming space in the “laborers’ paradise” 233 Works Cited 245 Appendix A - Interview Questions for Tour Companies 259 Appendix B – Interview Questions for Heritage Organizations 261 Appendix C – A Note on Place Names, Translations, and Transcriptions 262 iii List of Tables 2.1 Place-making and rhetoric in communist heritage tourism 28 7.1 International Tourist Arrivals, Europe and Subregions (millions) 170 7.2 Tourism in Poland 171 7.3 Tour prices, Nowa Huta 182 8.1 Inventory of Economic Development Organizations in the Kraków region 214 iv List of Figures Page 2.1 Modeling heritage production (after Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996) 31 2.2: The circuits of culture (after Johnson 1986) 33 3.1 Map-kiosk in Nowa Huta’s Central Square 45 3.2 Markers on Nowa Huta route 46 4.1 Pedestrian mall on Roses Avenue 67 4.2 Statue of Lenin, Roses Avenue 69 4.3 Radial plan 73 4.4 Model showing proposed cultural center (unbuilt) 76 4.5 Model showing proposed lake (unbuilt) 78 4.6 Painting by Chromicz showing proposed lake (unbuilt) 79 4.7 Planner’s sketch of hierarchy of neighborhood centers 80 4.8 Ðwit Cinema, currently used as retail space 85 4.9 Classical detailing in Plac Centralny (Central Square) 87 4.10 Urban plan for Stalingrad, by K. Alabyan, view 1 90 4.11 Urban plan for Stalingrad, by K. Alabyan, view 2 90 4.12 Headquarters of the steelworks, as seen from Central Square 91 4.13 Comparison of the headquarters of the steelworks and the Cloth Hall (Sukiennice ) 92 4.14 People’s Theater 94 4.15 Urban ensemble in Central Square 95 4.16 Apartment buildings in Wanda neighborhood unit 96 v 5.1 Bricklayers 103 5.2 Women plastering team 103 5.3 Location of Nowa Huta residential area and steelworks 115 5.4 Huta im. Sendzimira sign at entry to steelworks 118 5.5 Cistercian Abbey, Mogi »a 122 5.6 The ‘Cross of 1960’ 123 5.7 The ‘Cross of 1960,’ with crowd 124 5.8 The Ark of the Lord ( Arka Pana ) Church 128 5.9 Lipi ½ski, Stations of the Cross II 138 5.10 Lipi ½ski, Stations of the Cross XI 139 5.11 B. Chromy, Christ, Ark of the Lord Church 140 6.1 Prehistoric Nowa Huta (Nowa Huta website) 165 7.1 World Inbound Tourism: International Tourist Arrivals 169 7.2 Cloth Hall ( Sukiennice ) in Kraków’s Main Market Square 173 7.3 Pedestrian-only traffic in Kraków’s Main Market Square 174 7.4 Old Town, with Planty and Wawel Hill complex 175 7.5 Crazy Guides flyer 179 7.6 Crazy Guides: East German Trabant, with guide Jakób 180 7.7 Cooltours flyer 181 7.8 ‘1949 Klub’ 190 7.9 Tear-off map of Old Town, with Kazimierz 196 7.10 Comparison of front panels of Municipal brochures for Kazimierz and Nowa Huta 199 vi 7.11 Official Municipality of Kraków logo: “Magical Krakow” 205 8.1 Location of the Kraków Technology Park (KTP) relative to the Old Town, Nowa Huta, and HTS 227 8.2 Special Economic Zone (SEZ) sites in the Municipality of Kraków 228 vii Chapter 1 – Introduction In the last decade, an interesting new brand of tourism has arisen in central and eastern Europe: what Light (2000) and other urban geographers have termed “communist heritage tourism,” 1 or, the marketing of sites and objects associated with the communist past to tourists from the West. This manifestation of niche tourism (the appeal to narrow, specialized tourist interests) presents different aspects of experience from the communist era.