Nowa Huta (Polonia): l'utopia urbana dei lavoratori

The planned city of Nowa Huta, near Cracow, should have transformed, according to the intentions of its creators, Poland's old capital into an outpost of the working class. The experiment, whose constrcution started in 1949 at the initiative of the local Communist Party and based upon Soviet suggestions, should have replicated and, if possible, refined a socio-economic model already widespread in several areas of the USSR and, on a smaller scale, in other countries of the Eastern block. Compared to other similar models, Nowa Huta's exceptionality is embedded in the fact that it stands as the only case in which the socialist city has been designed through the forms and the lexicon of the Nineteenth-century bourgeois city, by pursuing an architectural vision both utopian and intrinsically contradictory.