ABSTRACT
The concept of the socialist city was a kind of social utopia that was used in the Soviet Union to implement the state's political and economic plans. In ideological terms, socialist cities were the new “cities of the future” in which a collective, communist society was planned to be shaped.
In Poland, which became a state dependent on the USSR after the end of WWII, the paradigms of socialist urban planning were mainly used in the plans for the reconstruction of existing cities. One of these cities was Wrocław, the fourth-largest city in modern Poland and a non-obvious example of a socialist city that stood out from other Polish cities due to its particularly difficult post-WWII beginning. Wrocław was the largest city of the so-called “Regained Lands”, a scene of mass migrations and a complete exchange of population, a city entirely “alien” to its new inhabitants, a source of building materials for the restoration of Warsaw, the subject and object of state propaganda and a place of intrusive search for “Polishness”. Wrocław's development was closely dependent on central state policy, which – because of the city's peripheral location and German past – was unstable and inconsistent. This chapter will outline the stages of reconstruction and extension of Wrocław that were carried out between 1945 and 1989 and their relationship to the central policy of the country.
