Second World Urbanity

Unfinished Utopia, Katherine Lebow’s meditation on the meaning and emergence of Nowa Huta as both an idea and a place, is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the postwar socialist city. Working primarily with memoirs, oral history, and previously untouched archival material, Kate draws out the story of Nowa Huta’s founding through the narratives of individual witnesses whose understandings of the city’s history inform a very personal, and at the same time, sweeping commentary on the role of the city in postwar Poland. Unlike books such as mine that take a consciously unemotional and institution-based approach to the study of the postwar city, Kate’s view of Nowa Huta is Continue reading →

Katherine Lebow’s book looks into Nowa Huta, a new town project that symbolized a wide spectrum of emotionally charged attitudes about socialism, communism, radical industrialization, modern architecture, and huge, top-down state projects, but also resistance and protests. Unfinished Utopia focuses on the largest new socialist town project in communist Eastern Europe under Stalinism, a turbulent period in the post-war history of Poland. Katherine successfully brings into one picture the large scale perspective of a state-socialist regime’s political and ideological project, the urban planning of a model city, and the experience of its various new inhabitants, taking an in-depth view of what such projects brought to tens of thousands of men and women in post-war Poland. We follow a close description of the almost decade long and harsh beginnings of the new industrial city and later when it was integrated into the city of Kraków, an outline of the workers’ protests and the Solidarity movement. Continue reading →

Katherine Lebow’s Unfinished Utopia is a stunning portrait of a fascinating city—Nowa Huta. Nowa Huta was the largest and most ambitious of a host of planned industrial cities that dotted the landscape of postwar Eastern Europe. Most of its residents worked at the nearby Lenin Steelworks and it served a crucial role in contemporary propaganda as a symbol of Poland’s Communist state’s success at rebuilding the country and constructing a new socialist future. Continue reading →

We’re pleased to announce the start of our next book discussion, which will be on Katherine Lebow’s Unfinished Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society, 1949-56 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2013). Similar to Sztálinváros in Hungary and Magnitogorsk in the Soviet Union, Nowa Huta was in that special category of socialist city built where no town had stood before. It was thus situated on the frontier of Polish socialism as a critical node in the country’s industrial development (Nowa Huta means “new foundry” or “new steelworks”) and its social transformation under Stalinism. In this richly researched study of Poland “first socialist city,” Lebow examines the creation of this new town as a window onto Poland’s first decade under communist rule. She focuses in particular on the experiences of Nowa Huta’s ordinary inhabitants, their engagement and manipulation of Stalinist ideology, and their role in the making of this new city. For many Nowohucians, Stalinist rhetoric about forging a new way of life and creating the New Man and New Woman resonated with their own desires to leave for good the villages from which they came and assume new, decidedly urban identities and living standards. This was a story of spatial, cultural, and social mobility that intersected, as it did in many other countries and cities of the Second World, with rapid industrialization and building socialism. Continue reading →