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Journal of Historical Geography 37 (2011) 113e126

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Journal of Historical Geography

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jhg

The changing identity of the Central European city: the case of Katowice
Monika Murzyn-Kupisz a, * and Krzysztof Gwosdz b
a
Department of Economic and Social History, Krakow University of Economics, ul. Rakowicka 27, 31-510 Krakow, Poland
b
Institute of Geography and Spatial Management, Jagiellonian University, ul. Gronostajowa 7, Krakow, Poland

Abstract

The issue of diverse identities imprinted on the urban landscape as the result of political changes and the struggle for power between different social and
ethnic groups is analysed here using the example of Katowice, the capital and largest urban centre in Upper Silesia, Poland. Basing their conclusions on
systematic investigation of the most important changes and features in the cityscape in five clearly distinct historical periods, the authors explore the
conditions and mechanisms of the creation of the city’s symbolic landscape and its links with urban identity. They argue that Katowice represents
a peculiar model of urban identity formation in Central and Eastern Europe that has to date not been researched in any depth, in which each successive
historical period represents a rupture with the foregoing values and ideas and an attempt to make a new, lasting imprint on the material outlook of the
city. The development of such a model of identity is the result of the complex interplay between the city’s changing geopolitical context and its economic
and functional development path.
Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Urban identity; Cultural landscape; Central Europe; Upper Silesia; Poland

The political and economic transformations in Central and Eastern
Europe after 1989 have significant implications for the landscape,
functions and social milieu of the region’s cities, changing signifi-
cantly the scope and pace of evolution of urban form and function
as well as its image and meaning.1 One of the main paradigms in the
human geography of post-socialist Europe is the issue of redefini-
tion and revaluation of territorial identity and return to old
meanings, or attribution of new meanings, in all manner of places
and settlements.2 Many post-socialist cities are currently searching
for and re-defining their identity, whether for the purpose of place
promotion to investors and tourists and its commodification or as
a means of enhancing the identification of the local population with
its place of residence. Both these ways of perceiving and using place
necessitate the re-examination of the significance of landscape
legacies for the city’s historic identity, a process which will illu-
minate contemporary discussions of urban image-making. This
may involve the rediscovery of unique or typical features of
a particular urban landscape and/or ‘the need to reinterpret and
alter inherited structures, features and images, including symbolic
meanings of buildings’.3 Strategies for undertaking this work
include looking for and emphasising a more or less distant mythical
‘golden past’, rediscovering the multicultural heritage of place and
accepting once dissonant heritage, or, conversely, ‘breaking with
the past’, i.e. emphasising the city’s contemporary achievements,
innovativeness and entrepreneurial spirit, at times in conjunction
with industrial knowledge and industrial heritage.
The relations between the old and the new and among the
various identities imprinted on the urban landscape are discussed
here using the example of Katowice, the capital and largest urban
centre of Upper Silesia (pop. 310,000 in 2008). This case has been
chosen for several reasons. In Upper Silesia, a typical borderland
region, power relations were often strictly connected with ethnicity

* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: murzynm@uek.krakow.pl, mmkupisz@gmail.com (M. Murzyn-Kupisz).
1
F.E.I. Hamilton, K. Dimitrovska-Andrews and N. Pichler-Milanovic (Eds), Transformation of Cities in Central and Eastern Europe: Towards Globalization, TokyoeNew York,
2005.
2
A. Dingsdale, New geographies of post-socialist Europe, Geographical Journal 165, 2 (1999) 145e153; F.E.I. Hamilton, Transformation and space in Central and Eastern
Europe, Geographical Journal 165, 2 (1999) 135e144; C. Young and S. Kaczmarek, The socialist past and postsocialist urban identity in Central and Eastern Europe: the case of
qódz, European Urban and Regional Studies 15, 1 (2008) 53e70.
3
T. Herrschel, The changing meaning of place in post-socialist Eastern Europe: commodification, perception and environment: introduction, Geographical Journal 165, 2
(1999) 130e134.

0305-7488/$ e see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2010.04.001
 Author's personal copy

114 M. Murzyn-Kupisz, K. Gwosdz / Journal of Historical Geography 37 (2011) 113e126

and national pride.4 From many standpoints the city of Katowice
(Kattowitz in German) may be regarded as unique in the urban
fabric of the Upper Silesian Industrial District as it was the only such
settlement emerging in the nineteenth century that had any origin
other than that based on heavy industry. With time, as its impor-
tance has grown, the city has been the focal point of the primary
conflicts in the area e the tension between the Polish and German
populations, and, after World War II, issues of over-industrialisa-
tion, hostile attitudes towards pre-socialist heritage and landscape
(both German and Polish), and attempts to create a new, socialist
urban identity. Finally, following the fall of the Iron Curtain both the
city and the region have experienced considerable changes in the
economic and social spheres exerting a significant influence on
urban landscape and its interpretation. As such Katowice is a very
interesting example of a place where the typical post-industrial
structural changes observed all over the world overlap with issues
of political and economic transformation unique to post-1989
Central and Eastern Europe.
This study examines urban identity understood as representa-
tions of a city within different discourse practices, power relations
and spheres of knowledge.5 The point of departure for the analysis
is the observation that Katowice represents a specific model of
urban identity formation, in which each successive historical period
represents a rupture with the foregoing values and ideas and an
attempt to make a new, lasting imprint on the material outlook of
the city and its image. The questions which may be raised in such
context are:
- What development path enables the emergence of a ‘rupture
with the past’ model of identity?
- What are the distinguishing features of a city which reflects
such a model?
- How is this model reflected and linked to the changes in urban
landscape?
After presenting a theoretical context for understanding the
links between landscape and identity, we discuss the changes to
Katowice’s urban landscape, underlining the most important
features of the cityscape in each period following an important
turning-point in the city’s history: its origins as a dynamic nine-
teenth-century commercial centre with a strong German identity,
the development of Katowice as a bastion of Polishness in the
interwar period, the re-Germanised Nazi Kattowitz, the communist
Stalinogród, Gierek’s city of real socialism, and the present-day
post-socialist urban centre. The aim of the critical analysis of the
city’s history is to show how frequent changes of dominant actors,
ideologies and attitudes towards the past influenced the urban
landscape and identity. We focus on the issue of historical changes
in the landscape and identity of the city as we are convinced that
knowledge of its complexities and careful analysis of the reasons
and mechanisms behind such changes should be a pre-condition
for and first step in the process of construction of a sound and
competitive image today. This pre-condition is not yet well enough
understood by the local authorities of many Polish cities, including
those in Katowice, who base their strategies for re-imagining and
marketing the city on a superficial knowledge of the landscapes in
question.
Landscape as the locus and expression of identity
The question of landscape as a social construct with diverse, often
contesting meanings and interpretations, and consequently the
issue of identity of place is one of the most important topics
researched by cultural geography.6 Urban landscape is a multifac-
eted construct which may be understood not only as a built
morphology of the city, its urban tissue, outlook and layout but also
as a complex set of meanings, representations and values with
which the urban settlement has been invested and which it
conveys. Landscape thus functions simultaneously as ‘form,
meaning and representation’ and as such ‘actively incorporates the
social relations that go into its making’.7 As a product of social
processes, the urban landscape ‘acts as a signifying system’8 and
‘reflects the conflicting ideologies of different cultures and the
struggles for power among social groups’.9 At the same time it
should be seen ‘as a cultural construction of a group [which] serves
generally the purpose of creating and/or maintaining the group’s
identity’.10 Consequently, according to Kapralski, ‘the construction
of a landscape and the construction of identity are inseparable parts
of a single process, as a result of which landscape becomes incor-
porated into the group’s identity, being one of the symbolic
representations of the latter’.11 As early as in the 1920s Halbwachs
noticed that ‘it is [not only] in society that people normally acquire
their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognise, and
localise their memories’.12 Every group’s identity needs a locus for
its expression, urban space being a crucial arena of such expression.
The memory of a nation or a social or ethnic group translated
and transposed into a city’s identity is thus most evidently man-
ifested in its urban landscape. Cities, both as real and as symbolic,
imaginary places, provide the setting for location of memory, and
contribute to the creation of both tangible and intangible sites of
memory e ‘lieux de mémoire’.13 It thus follows that landscape may
be regarded ‘as a contested, tensive topos of place, community, and
self in both the literal and the figurative sense of topos. The land-
scape is thus contested both as an actual place and as the figurative
site of an ongoing socio-political discourse concerning the relations
between community, self, and place’.14 When urban ideologies
change, the significance of the urban environment as a whole also
changes.15 As Graham stresses, landscapes are ‘multivocal and

4
R. Hartshorne, Geographic and political boundaries in Upper Silesia, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 23 4 (1933) 195e227; W. Rose, The Drama of Upper
Silesia, Brattleboro, 1935; K. Cordell (Ed), Politics of Ethnicity in Central Europe, New York, 2000.
5
N. Kinossian, Role of place identities in creating the post-socialist city, in: C. Young and T. Borén (Eds), Postsocialist Urban Identities, forthcoming.
6
D. Mitchell, Landscape, in: D. Atkinson, P. Jackson, D. Sibley and N. Washbourne (Eds), Cultural Geography. A Critical Dictionary of Key Concepts, London, 2005, 49; D.
Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, London, 1984; B. Graham, Ireland and Irishness: place, culture and identity, in: B. Graham (Ed), In Search of Ireland:
a Cultural Geography, London, 1997, 3e4; M. Czepczyn  ski, Cultural Landscapes of Post-Socialist Cities: Representation of Powers and Needs, Aldershot, 2008.
7
Mitchell, Landscape (note 6), 49.
8
J.S. Duncan, The City as Text: the Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom, Cambridge, 1990, 17. See also Cosgrove, Social Formation (note 6); S. Zukin,
Landscapes of Power. From Detroit to Disney World, Berkeley, 1993.
9
A. Baker, Introduction: the identifying of spaces and places, in: D. Vanneste (Ed), Space and Place. Mirrors of Social and Cultural Identities? Leuven, 1996, 1.
10
S. Kapralski, Battlefields of memory: landscape and identity in Polish-Jewish relations, History and Memory 13, 2 (2001), 35.
11
See note 10.
12
M. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, Chicago, 1992, 38.
13
A term coined by Pierre Nora: Between memory and history: les lieux de mémoire, Representations, 26 (1989) 7.
14
K.R. Olwig, Landscape as a contested topos of place, community and self, in: P.C. Adams (Ed), Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies, Minneapolis, 2001, 94.
15
M. Krampen, Meaning in the Urban Environment, London, 1979, 69. The same idea is central to Czepczyn  ski, Cultural Landscapes (note 6).
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M. Murzyn-Kupisz, K. Gwosdz / Journal of Historical Geography 37 (2011) 113e126
multicultural texts (.) capable of being read in a variety of con-
flicting ways’, and as such should be looked upon as ‘a powerful
medium in expressing feelings, ideas and values, while simulta-
neously being an arena of political discourse and action in which
cultures are continuously reproduced and contested’.16 Landscape
is thus not a given, solid, constant entity but an ever-changing
construct consisting of several layers of overlapping meanings
created by different social and ethnic groups and/or historical
periods; a ‘highly complex discourse in which a whole range of
economic, political, social and cultural issues is encoded and
negotiated’.17 At this point it is also important to underline that
landscapes are not only domains of remembering but equally
arenas of forgetting. Depending on historical period and the
political or economic powers in force, certain aspects of landscape,
both tangible and symbolic, will be underlined, while others are
forgotten or even purposefully destroyed. In this sense landscape is
a metaphoric battlefield ‘in which groups compete for the fullest
possible representation of their identities, trying, according to the
means at their disposal, to structure the landscape and invest it
with the meaning that is appropriate with respect to their
identities’.18
Emergence of the town of Kattowitz (1839e1921)
Berlin e eine grobe Grobstadt!
Breslau e eine grobe Kleinstadt!
Kattowitz e eine kleine Grobstadt!19
The urban development of Katowice illustrates well how
a contingent event can play a dominant role in shaping a settle-
ment’s future. A tiny village (pop. 685 in 1829) devoid of any
importance was chosen by Franz Winckler, a local entrepreneur, as
the headquarters for his properties (1839). This was the time when
Upper Silesia, a backward and neglected eastern fringe of Prussia,
was evolving into one of the biggest and densely populated urban
regions in Europe as a result of industrialisation based on its rich
coal and zinc deposits.20 Katowice was one of the winners in pro-
gressing to the top of the urban hierarchy in Upper Silesia mainly
due to the efforts and influences of its owner and the hostile atti-
tude of Bytom (Beuthen) municipal authorities towards railways. In
the middle of the nineteenth century the latter town was the main
centre of the region and the best candidate for maintaining its
dominant position.21 When Bytom town council refused to allow
the first railway line to pass through the town, Winckler pressed for
the route to be constructed near Katowice. Construction of other
railway lines followed. Owing to its direct connection with other
Prussian towns, as well as with Russia and Austria, Katowice
became a gateway town and an important railway junction. The
community’s urban aspirations were rewarded in 1865, when
Katowice was granted municipal status. Good accessibility and
well-designed urban space attracted state offices as well as head-
quarters of Upper Silesian companies. Trade and crafts flourished
16
Graham, Ireland and Irishness (note 6).
17
B. Graham, G.J. Ashworth and J.E. Tunbridge, A Geography of Heritage, London, 2002, 31.
18
Kapralski, Battlefields of memory (note 10), 37.
19
Berlin e a metropolitan city with a metropolitan air! Breslau e a metropolitan city with the air of a small town! Kattowitz e a small town with a metropolitan air!
Unknown nineteenth-century author quoted by W. Komorowski, Architektura Katowic wczesnego okresu miejskiego, in: E. Chojecka (Ed), Sztuka Górnego 
Dróg Europejskich i Regionalnych, Katowice, 1999, 359.
20
N. Pounds, The Upper Silesian Industrial Region, Bloomington, 1958.
21
D. G1azek, Industrial towns: the Case of Bytom, paper presented at the conference Power, Knowledge and Society in the City, Edinburgh, 4e7 September 2002; K. Gwosdz,
Ewolucja Rangi Miejscowosci w Konurbacji Przemysłowej. Przypadek Górnego 
22
Cordell, Politics of Ethnicity (note 4); T. Kamusella, Nation-building and the linguistic situation in Upper Silesia, European Review of History 1 (2002) 37e63.
23
G. Hoffmann, Geschichte der Stadt Kattowitz, Kattowitz, 1895, 59.
24
Komorowski, Architektura Katowic (note 19), 380.
25
I. Kozina, Chaos i Uporza˛ dkowanie. Dylematy Architektoniczne na Przemysłowym Górnym 
115
due to the busy rail junction and wealthy residents. As early as 1873
Katowice was promoted to the status of district centre. All of the
factors mentioned above created the self-sustainable cumulative
growth of Katowice. At the turn of the century, the town had
become one of the three main commercial centres of the Upper
Silesian Industrial Region.
From the 1850s, peripheral Katowice played a role as an outpost
of German culture in the east. In contrast to surrounding towns,
where industry constituted the main function and manual labour-
ers were the dominant social strata, Katowice was characterised by
the dominance of the German middle class, and an economy based
on administration, trade and services. In Upper Silesia, from the
beginning of industrialisation, social position had been linked to
nationality. The lower classes, identified with manual workers,
consisted mainly of Silesian folk, whose identity and language was
mainly regional or Polish-oriented and who were Catholic. Any
promotion to the middle class was closely linked to the adoption of
the German language and identity and the Protestant religion.22
The relatively sizeable Jewish community of Kattowitz also iden-
tified with German culture and language (see Table 1).
In the contemporary German literature, the city’s development
was interpreted from a purely colonial and masculine perspective
as a great and successful civilisation mission of German men. The
local rural folk ‘living in shacks’, representing backwardness and
resistance to progress, were contrasted with the German urban
middle class, representing industry, progress and welfare. Any
symptoms of resistance to change were regarded as ‘a desperate
fight with no future’ and compared to the resistance of the indig-
enous North American population to colonisation.23
The dominance of German culture was strongly expressed in the
cityscape. German architectural ideas predominated, with archi-
tects mainly brought in from Berlin and Wroc1aw (Breslau), and
most often copying tendencies and forms observed elsewhere in
the Prussian/German state.24 According to Kozina, the confession of
the first house of worship in Kattowitz e the Protestant church near
the Friedrichsplatz (so as to serve the Prussian managerial class),
the name of the city’s most modern mid-nineteenth-century hotel
(de Prusse), and the style of both buildings (the so-called ‘Run-
dbogenstil’ popular and fashionable in Prussia at the time) may be
interpreted as:
a manifestation of membership of the close-knit circle of
Protestant residents of the settlement, connected by
common interests and propagators of the Prussian raison
d’état in the area.25
Similarly, the Catholic church built in 1862e1870 referred to
North-Rhine Gothic (Fig. 1). The house of worship of the third
confession present in Katowice, the Jews, was built in 1861, also
in the neo-Romanesque Rundbogenstil style, mixed with Moorish
references. The Moorish style showed the uniqueness of the
Jewish faith and culture, while the Rundbogenstil confirmed
identification with and support of GermanePrussian culture as
Sla˛ ska na Przecie˛ ciu
Sla˛ ska (1830e2000), Krakow, 2004.
Sla˛ sku w Latach 1763e1955, Katowice, 2005, 49.
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116 M. Murzyn-Kupisz, K. Gwosdz / Journal of Historical Geography 37 (2011) 113e126

Table 1 This first development phase, the transformation of the village

Denominational and linguistic identification of inhabitants of Katowice in different of Katowice into the city of Kattowitz, created an approach to the
historical periodsa
heritage of previous periods which would from now on be
Year 1866 1910 1931 2002 repeated: breaking with the past, disavowing its achievements, and
Area in sq. km 4.4 4.6 40.2 164.5 focusing on creation of new symbols looking ‘forward’ to the future.
Population (in thousands) 4.8 43.2 126.1 327.2

Denomination (%)
Catholic 69.7 70.8 89.8
Protestant 18.4 20.6 5.1
Jewish 11.9 7.6 4.5
Other 0.0 0.9 0.6
Mother tongue (%)
German 85.4 13.4
Polish 13.4 84.9
Otherb 1.2 1.7
a
Authors’ elaboration based on: Gemeindelexikon, 1912, Vol. 6: Regierungsbezirk
Oppeln; Statystyka Polski, Seria C, 54 Warszawa 1937; www.stat.gov.pl; no data on
denomination and mother tongue is available for the 1945e2001 period.
b
For 2002 the category ‘Other’ includes all those who declared languages other
than Polish, or both Polish and other languages, as their mother tongue.
a manifestation of assimilation tendencies within the Ger-
maneJewish Diaspora.26 The second Katowice synagogue built in
the late nineteenth century and the new neo-mediaeval churches
of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century, such as St
_ and SS Peter and Paul, also seemed to under-
Joseph’s in Za1e˛ ze
line links to German culture.
The same applied to the public monuments built in the city, such
as the monument to the emperors Wilhelm I and Frederick III at
Wilhelmsplatz, and the Bismarck Tower erected in 1903 on Beata
Hill. Such towers commemorating Otto von Bismarck after his
death in 1898 could be found in cities all over Germany. The Ger-
manness of the city was also expressed in its street and square
names, commemorating Prussian or German heroes, political
figures and creators of culture (e.g. Goethe, Schiller, Bismarck) or
local leaders (e.g. Friedrich W. Grundmann, Richard Holtze). At the
turn of the nineteenth century the development of Katowice also
reflected international urban trends, with the quarters of Giszowiec
(Gieschewald) and Nikiszowiec (Nikischacht) being an expression
of two models of workers’ settlements proposed around 1900. The
former, constructed in 1907e1910 was a garden city settlement; the
latter, built in 1904e1912, a multifamily residential quarter refer-
ring to the social housing idea used in proletariat housing in Berlin.
Both could also be seen as a symbol of the social progress of Silesia
under late German rule.
It is also important to underline that the development of the
village into a significant urban centre was from the very beginning
far from spontaneous and chaotic, in contrast to other nearby
industrial settlements. Thanks to the work of the Winckler family’s
court architect, Heinrich M.A. Nottebohm, and Winckler’s friends
actively engaged in the development of the new centre, Richard
Holze and Friedrich W. Grundmann, long before it obtained its city
charter Katowice had a master plan, which inspired the creation of
an attractive urban space including delimitation of main roads of
urban character such as Friedrichstrasse and Industriestrasse, and
squares such as Friedrichsplatz (later Grundmannplatz, and today’s
Rynek) in the west, and Wilhelmsplatz (today’s Wolnosci Square) in
the east (Fig. 2).27
Capital of the autonomous Silesian region (1922e1939)
Following World War I, the situation of the city changed dramati-
cally. After long diplomatic negotiations, three Silesian uprisings
(1919e1921) and a plebiscite (in which the residents of Upper Silesia
voted on whether they wanted to be a part of Poland or Germany)
95.2
Upper Silesia was divided. Most of the area stayed within Germany,
4.8
but the eastern part of the region was annexed to the reborn Republic
of Poland. Although the majority of residents of Katowice voted for
Germany (85%), the town was allocated to Poland.
This German town in the eastern fringes of Germany was
steadily transformed into an outpost of Polishness near the coun-
try’s western border. The economic and cultural importance of the
city continued to increase. Granted the status of capital of the
autonomous region of Silesia in 1922, it assumed a lot of new
functions. In addition to becoming the seat of the regional
authorities and regional parliament, Katowice became the capital of
a new Polish Roman Catholic diocese and the base for more than 50
banks, eight consulates general, and numerous headquarters of
large companies, as well as the Higher Mining Authority.28
In 1924 the Silesian Parliament decided to enlarge the city’s area
threefold. By incorporating several neighbouring villages, the so-
called Greater Katowice was created (Fig. 2). The primary and
officially acknowledged reason for this was to ensure enough space
for urban development. Another important issue, however, was to
‘Polonise’ the ethnic structure of its inhabitants, as it was mainly
Polish-speaking population that inhabited the settlements added to
the city (see Table 1).29 Moreover, the enlargement radically altered
the character of the city’s landscape, as great industrial complexes
were now included in it.
The public authorities’ efforts to create a Polish identity for
Katowice and hence enhance the authority of Poland in the Silesian
territories were especially visible in the city centre. The flagship
public investment of the time was the new complex of the Silesian
Regional Offices and Silesian Parliament (Fig. 3). It was to become
an important symbol of the Polishness of Katowice. As stated in the
speech of the Silesian regional governor, Micha1 Grazy _ n
 ski:
We here want to be more than ordinary workers struggling
for daily bread, creators of material goods: we also have the
ambition to contribute to the ‘Polish melody’ e a strong
Silesian voice throughout the country. And that’s why in
addition to hospitals and sanatoria, schools and kindergar-
tens, workers’ houses and workplaces, the idea was proposed
to build in the capital of the region a monumental, aesthet-
ically valuable edifice for the Regional Authorities and the
Silesian Parliament, an edifice which would be a beautiful
expression of the artistic abilities and craftsmanship of Polish
architects, craftsmen and workers that would be a material
symbol of Polish culture and power.30
Consequently the only significant condition and limitation
placed upon architects during the competition for the new building

26
Kozina, Chaos i Uporza˛ dkowanie (note 25), 54.
27 _ et nova villa Katowice, Kronika Wiadomosci Krajowych i Zagranicznych 240 (1856).
Hoffmann, Geschichte der Stadt Kattowitz (note 23); J. Lompa, Bogucice, Za1e˛ ze,
28
Gwosdz, Ewolucja Rangi (note 21).
29
Rose, The Drama of Upper Silesia (note 4).
30
W. Odorowski, Architektura Katowic w Latach Mie˛ dzywojennych 1922e39, Katowice, 1994, 55.
 Author's personal copy
M. Murzyn-Kupisz, K. Gwosdz / Journal of Historical Geography 37 (2011) 113e126
Fig. 1. The neo-Gothic Church of Our Lady closing off the perspective of the newly regenerated Mariacka Street in the nineteenth-century centre of Katowice. Photograph by Marcin
Kupisz, September 2009. Used with permission.
was the indication that any references to the Gothic style (regarded
as German) were banned.31 The monumental edifice was built very
quickly (1924e1927) to a design which included modernised neo-
classical references mixed with Polish Art Déco decoration,
including prismatic forms and ornaments inspired by Polish high-
lander art as well as patriotic mural paintings. Given that it was the
Polish culture- and language-oriented population of Katowice that
was Catholic, the new Catholic cathedral building was intended as
another proof of the city’s Polishness. The original design envisaged
an imposing building visible on the city’s skyline thanks to the
magnificent dome planned.
It was, however, looking forward into the future that made
Katowice a unique artistic and national project of interwar Poland.
The initial opposition of the regional authorities to building truly
modern architecture was clearly overcome by the late 1920s. As
posited by Waldemar Odorowski the PolisheGerman rivalry over
the territory of Upper Silesia
in times of peace (.) took on the form of competition, which
on the Polish side aimed at proving its historic rights to the
region, (.) showing and testifying to the cultural and civi-
lisational progress of Silesia taking place under Polish rule.32
The marked contrast between the classicising architecture offi-
cially promoted in Germany at the time, where modern art was
authoritatively rejected and forbidden by the Nazi regime, being
31
Kozina, Chaos i Uporza˛ dkowanie (note 25), 105.
32
Odorowski, Architektura Katowic (note 30), 9.
33 _
W. Odorowski, Wiezowce Katowic i ich tresci ideowo-propagandowe, in: E. Chojecka (Ed), O Sztuce Górnego 
referring to comments made in 1932.
117
dubbed pejoratively Entartete Kunst, and the ultra-modern avant-
garde forms observed in Katowice during the functionalist archi-
tecture boom visible in the city (in both high-quality office and
luxury tenement buildings) from the late 1920s was to provide
clear proof of the modern, dynamic development of the Polish part
of Silesia.
Katowice became the first Polish city endowed with skyscrapers.
The opening of the first 15-storey skyscraper office building in
Poland, the home of the Silesian Tax Authorities (1930e1934) in the
city centre prompted comments and explanations that high-rise
buildings suited the character of the city and the region very well,
as: ‘Silesia is the most American region of Poland’.33 Despite the
Great Depression, the United States continued to be perceived in
interwar Poland as the most enterprising and dynamic country in
the world, a symbol of modernity and development, yet as
a cultural melting pot, a country whose culture was not a threat to
Polish identity. Hence the ease with which the American character
of Silesia was proposed from the Polish point of view, conjuring an
image of breaking with the (German) past and creating a new,
Polish identity e understood as modern, dynamic and enterprising.
A good expression of public involvement in creating such
a modern image for the city was the 1930 competition for the
design of the new Silesian Museum. In contrast to the modernised
classicist forms used for other monumental museum projects
taking place in Poland in the interwar period (e.g. the national
Sla˛ ska i Przyległych Ziem Małopolskich, Katowice, 1993, 268,
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118 M. Murzyn-Kupisz, K. Gwosdz / Journal of Historical Geography 37 (2011) 113e126

Fig. 2. Significant landmarks in the landscape of Katowice.

museums in Warsaw and Krakow), in Katowice an avant-garde
functionalist design was chosen.34
A city’s character is also very much shaped by its most important
public spaces and urban interiors. In the interwar period the Polish
authorities clearly tried to play down the importance of earlier
existing (German) centres of urban activity nearby the train station
closed off by Friedrichsplatz (renamed in Polish Rynek e ‘Square’)
and Wilhelmplatz (renamed Plac Wolnosci e ‘Liberty Square’) by
creating a new urban forum. Silesian Parliament Square (Plac Sejmu
 ˛ skiego), surrounded by the newly built monumental edifices of
Sla
the Regional Authorities Building, the Silesian Museum and the
Silesian Administrative Offices building was to form the new most
important, prestigious public space in Katowice (Fig. 2). An addi-
tional element of this complex, though not a direct part of the
forum, but closing off its east-west viewing axis, was the new
functionalist garrison church of St Casimir. To complete the
symbolic meaning of the new forum, two imposing monuments
were to be placed in it. The first monument was to be dedicated to
the eleventh-century king Boles1aw Chrobry e the first crowned
Polish monarch. Its pendant, showing the symbolic continuation of
Polish rule in Silesia over time, was to be a monument consisting of
an equestrian statue of Marshal Józef Pi1sudski and the figure of
a Silesian mother with a child e a structure commemorating both
the famous leader and creator of independent Poland and the
bravery of Silesian uprisings and fight for Polishness after World
War I.35
A straightforward attempt to erase the old identity of the
place and create a new one may be seen in the fate of monu-
ments such as the Bismarck Tower. In 1922 a group of Silesian
insurgents tried to remodel the face of Otto von Bismarck into the
face of Marshal Józef Pi1sudski and alter the inscription on the
monument. In 1925 a memorial plaque to Tadeusz Kosciuszko
was added, and in 1933 the whole structure was finally
completely dismantled.
Re-Germanisation of Katowice (1939e1945)
In 1940 Katowice, renamed Kattowitz, became the capital of the
New German Upper Silesian Region, directly incorporated into the
Third Reich. The aim of the German authorities was ‘to break the

34
Kozina, Chaos i Uporza˛ dkowanie (note 25), 126.
35 _
B. Szczypka-Gwiazda, Reprezentacyjne za1ozenie  , Archi-
placu-forum w Katowicach jako próba stworzenia ‘przestrzeni symbolicznej’, in: E. Chojecka (Ed), Przestrzen
tektura Malarstwo. Wybrane Zagadnienia Sztuki Górnosla˛ skiej, Katowice, 1995, 103e135.
 Author's personal copy
M. Murzyn-Kupisz, K. Gwosdz / Journal of Historical Geography 37 (2011) 113e126
Fig. 3. The monumental edifice of the Silesian Parliament e the most symbolic landmark of the interwar period. Photograph by Marcin Kupisz, September 2009. Used with
permission.
morale of the Polish residents and wipe out the Polish character of
the city acquired during the time it was a part of the Second Polish
Republic’.36 This was done through murders, mass expulsions of
Poles, mainly those who had arrived in the region after 1922,
migrations, or forced inclusion on the so-called Volksliste (a list of
those persons who claimed German nationality). Most importantly,
the former inhabitants of Upper Silesia were to be replaced with
ethnic Germans, with the ultimate number of German settlers
envisaged at almost 400,000.37 In addition to forbidding the use of
Polish in the public domain, whether as a spoken language or in
street signage, the destruction of symbols of Polishness was
systematically conducted: destruction of monuments, demolition
of the newly built Silesian Museum. The Nazis destroyed the
museum building eagerly, although it had more to do with interwar
international functionalist architectural trends than with a partic-
ular national (in this case Polish) milieu, but paradoxically they left
intact the most monumental and obvious symbol of Polish domi-
nation in the city in the interwar period e the building of the
Silesian Regional Authorities. The Polish character of the latter
edifice was probably not noticed by the Nazis. When they took over
Katowice in 1939, its high functional, then state-of-the-art qualities
were much appreciated, and after the Polish eagle decorating the
main entrance to the building was taken down, it was easily
transformed into the administrative headquarters of the Third
Reich in Katowice.
The brief period of Nazi rule has so far been the only period in
the city’s history which was clearly focused on the legacy of
a previous development phase, i.e. a return to the city’s nineteenth-
century German heritage. It was also the only period in which no
36
Z. Wo
zniczka, Katowice 1945e1950, Katowice, 2004, 5.
37
Cordell, Politics of Ethnicity (note 4), 105.
38
Cordell, Politics of Ethnicity (note 4), 137.
39
Wozniczka, Katowice 1945e1950 (note 36), 46e47.
119
new significant elements were added to the cityscape. It also
brought the end of Katowice’s ethnic and religious multiculturalism
with the annihilation by the Nazis of the Katowice Jewish
community and the destruction of most of the city’s Jewish
heritage.
Katowice in the communist period (1945e1989)
Within the post-Yalta order, German lands were defined as those
lying west of the rivers Oder and Neisse. The new political system
imposed on Central and Eastern Europe, including Poland, by the
Soviet Union totally changed the conditions in which the urban
fabric was created and maintained. In Katowice efforts to de-Ger-
manise and re-Polonise the urban landscape overlapped with the
Sovietization undertaken by the new political authorities in all
spheres of life.
From February 1945 the eradication of all signs of ‘Germanness’
of the city, including advertising hoardings and shop signs, could be
observed. The German inhabitants of Katowice were to leave the
city either voluntarily or by force. The newcomers in their place
included people equally involuntarily repatriated from the former
Polish eastern territories, by then within the Soviet Union, as well
as people from other parts of Poland in search of better employ-
ment possibilities.38 The arrival of numerous new settlers with
Polish but not Silesian identity was a source of new problems. As
Wo zniczka posits, new settlers from the East were surprised to find
that in Upper Silesia they encountered not only Germans and
German property left behind by expellees, but an indigenous
Silesian population.39 The old and the new inhabitants of Upper
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120 M. Murzyn-Kupisz, K. Gwosdz / Journal of Historical Geography 37 (2011) 113e126
Silesian towns were thus often very hostile towards each other, the
first group keen to maintain its own identity and the pre-war
traditions of the city, the second, supported by the communist
authorities, wanting to create a new, monocultural identity.
Initially, in January 1946, Upper Silesia also had the second-most
numerous Jewish population in Poland, after Lower Silesia, but in
line with the communist authorities’ wish to create a monoethnic
socialist Polish nation, as in other parts of Poland, the share of
Jewish inhabitants of Upper Silesia (including Katowice) declined
constantly due to outward migrations in the late 1940s, mid-1950s,
and finally 1968.
The power of the new system found its direct expression in
many ways. The most striking, though temporary, manifestation of
it was the renaming of Katowice ‘Stalinogród’ (‘The city of Stalin’) in
1953. Why was Katowice ‘honoured’ out of all the many other
Polish towns and cities? Many explanations include suggestions
such as the authorities’ desire to change the negative attitude of the
region’s Silesian inhabitants, traditionally proud and stubborn
individuals, towards communism. On the other hand, Katowice was
keenly promoted by socialist propaganda as ‘the industrial heart of
Poland’, and as heavy industry and the industrial working class
were to be the foundations of the new, socialist Poland, the name
suited the city very well. The city’s proper name was restored to it
in 1956.40
One of the central pillars of socialist ideology was its anti-
German and anti-capitalist propaganda. As part of the broad
ideological attempt to rewrite history embedded in the urban
landscape, the state aimed to remove all traces of pre-socialist
ideology. A typical measure was to present the world in terms of
such a dichotomy: everything before 1945 was bad, and everything
after that date good. In portraying the urban tissue of Upper Silesia,
for example, the narrow lanes with houses close to each other
dating from before the war were contrasted with the post-war
modern, ‘green’ housing estates.41 All street names that conveyed
‘inappropriate’ (capitalist, religious or non-Polish) identities were
also changed. Silesian Parliament Square, for example, was
renamed ’Felix Dzerzhinsky Square’.
Any traces of German presence in the city were systematically
wiped out. The part of the Protestant cemetery where the tombs of
the city’s fathers were was levelled. The villa of one of the most
important figures in the nineteenth-century history of Katowice e
F. Grundmann e was demolished. Most of the above-mentioned
mining colony of Giszowiec, an exceptional, high-quality working-
class quarter was destroyed. About two hundred semi-detached
miners’ houses set in attractive gardens were pulled down to make
room for a new housing estate of 11-storey skyscrapers in the 1960s
and the early 1970s. The eradication of any potential positive
connotations with both German rule and capitalism that Giszowiec
conveyed was accompanied by the change of its ‘capitalist’ and
German name into Polish.
The most monumental examples of 1950s landmarks in Kato-
wice are the Palace of Youth and the huge building of the Trade
Unions Headquarters constructed directly opposite the interwar
Silesian Parliament Building on the site of the demolished Silesian
Museum. Their construction may be seen as both emphasising the
new e socialist e identity of Katowice and negating the ideas and
achievements of the Second Polish Republic. Similarly, the cathe-
dral building, which was not finished before the outbreak of the
40
Z. Wozniczka, KatowiceeStalinogródeKatowice (1953e1956), Dzieje Najnowsze 3 (2007) 89e109.
41
F. Brzozowska and M. Kanikowska, Geografia dla Klasy 4, Warszawa, 1974.
42
J. Moskal, W. Janota and W. Szewczyk, Bogucice, Załe˛ z_ e et Nova Villa Katowice. Rozwój w Czasie i Przestrzeni, Katowice, 1993, 52.
43
Wo zniczka, Katowice 1945e1950 (note 36), 485.
44
A.H. Dawson, From glittering icon to., Geographical Journal 165, 2 (1999) 154e160.
war, was not completed until 1948e1956, with the height of the
dome significantly lower than originally designed and the interior
furnishings much less lavish and of lower artistic quality than
originally intended. The symbol of Christian ideology could not be
allowed to dominate the cityscape of communist Stalinogród. The
interwar idea of a representative Silesian Forum was not realised.
As references to interwar Poland and Pi1sudski were not welcomed
by the communist regime, the monument of Pi1sudski and the
Silesian Mother was never installed. Instead, in 1967 a new
imposing Monument to the Silesian Insurgents was erected in
a different location. This time it contained no references to
Pi1sudski, but comprised three expressive monumental wings
symbolising the three Silesian uprisings (Fig. 4).
The new authorities wanted to create a new city centre e this
time breaking with both traditions: the German and the interwar.
In 1954 a new master plan was proposed for the city, with the
following explanation:
The centre of socialist Stalinogród will be concentrated
around the much widened square. The present-day theatre
building on the square will remain; other buildings, being
the heritage of the capitalist age, will be removed, creating
space for large, modern administrative, retail and cultural
edifices. In the vicinity of the square, (.) the construction of
the monumental buildings of the Silesian Public Library, the
Silesian Opera House, the Orbis Hotel and the Central
Department Store will commence in the immediate future.42
The architecture of the planned buildings was to comply with
the official artistic style promoted by the communist authorities, i.e.
socialist realism, in contrast with interwar functionalist architec-
ture. Although the reconstruction of the market square and its
vicinity did not begin until the early 1960s, when socialist realism
was no longer the official artistic style, with the state being the only
investor interested in large modernist projects which suited its
ideas of progress, this residents’ meeting place, this space which
prior to World War II had served as the city centre, surrounded by
good hotels and restaurants, was transformed into the city’s
transport hub, ‘modern and functional’ in the view of the official
propaganda (Fig. 5). Individual large buildings were erected in place
of the demolished historicist and early twentieth-century archi-
tecture. The remaining urban tissue of the nineteenth and first half
of the twentieth centuries that was abundant in the city centre was
neglected and allowed to deteriorate.
In the post-war period a stereotypical image as the industrial
heart of Poland was imposed on the city, in which, however, one
could enjoy a slightly higher standard of living than in the other
cities of socialist Poland.43 Apart from the standard, dull, often poor
quality architecture built during socialist times, the system also
produced ‘glittering icons’ e ‘landscape elements that were created
with a view to symbolising the polity of the communist period’.44 In
socialist countries, particularly after the twilight of the Stalinist era
in 1956, architecture had two faces. The first was the earlier
mentioned banal, repetitious, poor quality, standard-oriented
technocratic face well reflected in huge, monotonous pre-fabri-
cated housing estates and other ‘standard’ buildings. The second
was strikingly different, consisting of unique, ‘one of a kind’, pres-
tigious ‘virtuoso’ buildings both in formal and technological terms.
Such outstanding edifices, most often connected to culture, leisure
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M. Murzyn-Kupisz, K. Gwosdz / Journal of Historical Geography 37 (2011) 113e126
Fig. 4. Symbols of the modern city of real socialism e General Zietek roundabout with the expressive Monument to the Silesian Insurgents and the ‘Flying saucer’ concert and sports
hall. Photograph by Marcin Kupisz, September 2009. Used with permission.
and travel, were designed to promote a positive, dynamic and
modern image of socialism. Their daring, striking, often state-of-
the-art shape, clad in costly, sophisticated construction materials
offered a rare possibility of artistic expression to the best Polish
architects, who willingly participated in competitions for the
design of such buildings. Against the backdrop of the rather grey
and uniform socialist landscape, they indeed seemed to be
‘glittering icons’ and could be regarded as ‘imps of perversity’ e
daring, almost obscene signs of a different world.45 Katowice
seemed to testify very well to this model. On the one hand, a much
more dispersed urban structure was promoted by the construction
of new sub-centres in the form of numerous large, dull socialist
housing estates, many built of pre-fabricated construction mate-
rials. On the other hand, several prestigious landmarks were built,
in time often becoming crucial elements of the city’s image (Fig. 2).
In 1950, for example, the idea to create a leisure area in the heart
of Upper Silesia was conceived. The Regional Park of Culture and
Recreation located on the border between Katowice, Chorzów and
Siemianowice Sla  ˛ skie opened to the public as early as 1954. The
park was to be a symbol of socialist leisure, offering active and
passive recreation, education and entertainment possibilities to the
working class, and as such an antithesis of a typical bourgeois park.
It consisted among others, of the huge Central Silesian Football
Stadium, and the first planetarium in Poland. The latter was, at the
moment of its construction (1953e1956), thanks to its expressive
form (incongruent with the officially compulsory socialist realism
45 
D. Crowley, Socmodernism a architektura czasu wolnego w Europie Srodkowo-Wschodniej
Dziedzictwa, Krakow, 2008, 227e256.
46
Kozina, Chaos i Uporza˛ dkowanie (note 25), 222.
47 _
Z. Rykiel, O wyobrazeniach  ˛ ska, Dokumentacja Geograficzna 3e4 (1991) 113e121.
i stereotypach przestrzennych na przyk1adzie Sla
121
style) and unique structure, regarded as the most modern of the
only 29 planetariums then existing in the world.46
The second ‘virtuoso’ building e the large concert, sports and
leisure complex e the Concert Hall designed as an early tensegrity
structure e was built in 1964e1971 on the site of a nineteenth-
century zinc mill. Thanks to its excellent functional properties and
striking flying saucer shape, ‘Spodek’ (The Saucer) became the sole
symbol of Katowice widely recognised all over Poland (Fig. 4).47
Another outstanding socialist landmark was the new Katowice train
station, built in 1965e1972. With its striking glass-fronted main hall
and expressive vaulting resting on 16 stalactitic raw concrete columns
it became universally acknowledged as the prime example of 1960s
international brutalist architectural design in Poland.
The city was also endowed with the largest single residential
unit in Poland e the ‘Superblok’ (Super-unit), housing 3000
people e and two socialist housing estates of above-average archi-
tectural qualities, regarded as very innovative. In the 1960s, Tysia˛ -
clecia (the Millennium of the Polish State) estate with state-of-the-
art 14-storey residential skyscrapers, dubbed ‘Corncobs’, was built.
The turn of 1970s and 1980s saw the construction of Rozdzien  skiego
e Gwiazdy (Star) Estate with its striking 20-storey star-shaped
residential skyscrapers. Involuntarily, or perhaps intentionally on
the part of their designers, though this was not revealed to nor
noticed by the authorities, these projects were not a challenge to the
interwar skyscrapers but rather a sign of continuation of the city’s
pre-war avant-garde architectural tradition.
w latach 60. i 70. XX wieku, in: J. Purchla (Ed), Florencja i Kraków Wobec
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122 M. Murzyn-Kupisz, K. Gwosdz / Journal of Historical Geography 37 (2011) 113e126

Fig. 5. Rynek (Main Square), formerly Friedrichsplatz, transformed into a transport hub in real socialist times. Photograph by Marcin Kupisz, September 2009. Used with permission.

Post-socialist transformation
1989 was another turning-point in the shaping of Katowice’s urban
landscape and its meanings, though different in one crucial aspect
from all previous stages: the lack of ethnic change. The radical turn
from a centrally planned to a market economy, and from produc-
tion to consumption eroded the economic strength of the Upper
Silesian Industrial Region, the biggest complex of heavy industry in
Central Europe. Many Upper Silesian cities were forced to seek new
bases for development, and some fell into deep crisis. Katowice,
which aimed to become a ‘financial, educational and regional
metropolis’, managed to maintain and even strengthen its rank
within the region, but it lost its popular meaning in Poland as
a symbolic centre of the mining and steel industry. New dominant
forces transforming the symbolic cityscape include commercial
investors and developers, both domestic and foreign, and demo-
cratically elected local and regional authorities.
The first aspect of change in the symbolic landscape is the filling
of the city centre with new commercial buildings, above all seats of
financial institutions, office buildings and new shopping centres. In
the northern part of the city centre (Fig. 2) in particular a sort of CBD
is being created, partly in an attempt to recall Katowice’s pre-war
tradition as an enterprising city of skyscrapers. For example, the
new skyscraper, ‘Altus’, a mixed-use facility comprising a hotel,
shops, offices, a cinema and restaurants, claims to be the highest
building in Southern Poland. In turn public actors support projects
emphasising the cultural function of the city, such as the new seat of
the Silesian Library, the development of ‘Symphony’ music centre,
and the planned Silesian Museum Buildings. It is now possible to
commemorate the struggles of the city’s inhabitants against
communism. In this respect perhaps the most symbolic site of
resistance is the monument dedicated to the nine miners who died
as the result of the pacification of the protesting Wujek mine on 16th
December 1981, just after Martial Law was proclaimed in Poland.
Secondly, for the first time in the city’s history its past is not
explicitly negated on ethnic or ideological grounds, though neither
is it strongly emphasised. In contrast to other cities in Poland
founded and developed in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries,
such as qód z, Gdynia or Stalowa Wola, which attempt to define and
emphasise a mythical ‘golden age’ in their past, Katowice does not
visibly use nostalgia to refer to any of its pasts in its place marketing
strategy.48 Acceptation of the city’s German past is still in its
infancy. If certain individuals or sites are commemorated they are
most likely stripped of their German connotations and presented
through a non-ethnic and local context. For example, a modest
monument commemorating the destroyed part of the Protestant
cemetery was erected in 2002 with the following inscription: ‘To
the memory of the city founders and other outstanding citizens of
the city resting in the Protestant cemetery’, without any indication
of those founders’ names or their ethnic background. F. Winckler,
the real founding father of Katowice, has not to date been
commemorated in the city in any way.49 Following a renaissance of
interest in Jewish culture in Poland, in Katowice as in other Polish
cities,50 some efforts have been made to recall the presence of the

48
Young and Kaczmarek, The socialist past (note 2).
49
The few references to German past in public space include two new streets in the city, named after F. Grundmann and M. Goeppert-Mayer (a Nobel prize winner in
physics in 1963 born in Katowice), and a small bust of R. Holze.
50
M. Murzyn-Kupisz and J. Purchla (Eds), Reclaiming Memory. Urban Regeneration in the Historic Jewish Quarters in Central Europe, Kraków, 2009.
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Fig. 6. Nikiszowiec (Nikischacht) an early twentieth-century residential workers’ quarter. Photograph by Marcin Kupisz, September 2009. Used with permission.
once numerous Jewish community in the city, e.g. a commemora-
tive plaque on the site of the former synagogue, restoration of the
historic Jewish cemetery, the latter undertaken by the ‘Or Chaim’
(Light of Life) foundation founded in Katowice jointly by Christian
and Jewish communities in 2005.
Some heritage which was rejected in communist times as both
German and capitalist is now willingly accepted and promoted but
reinterpreted as local and regional. A good example is the growing
popularity of the working quarter of Nikiszowiec (Fig. 6), marketed
as a unique in shape yet typical Silesian quarter. We may thus say
that for the first time in the city’s history parts of its landscape are
regarded as conveying a regional rather than Polish or German
identity. The main force promoting such a point of view is the
Silesian Autonomy Movement established in 1990.
A return to some representations dating back to the interwar
period in Katowice is likewise a visible trend, though one with two
distinct faces, emphasising either the regional or the national
aspect of the city’s identity. This is well illustrated by two neigh-
bouring monuments, placed in prestigious locations in front of the
Regional Parliament Building in the 1990s: Józef Pi1sudski, and his
political opponent Wojciech Korfanty. The first may be interpreted
as a reminder of unifying tendencies within the interwar Polish
state, the second as referring to Silesian autonomy within the Polish
state.
The landscape elements created during the socialist period are
not explicitly rejected either, and often regarded as urban icons,
though without their ideological background and socialist origins
being emphasised. For example, some elements of socialist heritage
are in line with the city’s present-day marketing strategies, e.g. the
unique shape and function of the ‘Saucer’ Concert and Sports Hall
fits well with the promotion of Katowice as ‘the city of great events’.
Many heavy industry sites have been closed for production,
which has opened up the question of exploitation of those areas.
51
J. Cowie and J. Heathcott (Eds), Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization, Ithaca and London, 2003, 3.
123
Initially the city tried not to emphasise its industrial past, but rather
to forget about it. Since the turn of the new millennium, however,
a certain dose of ‘smokestack nostalgia’ may be seen. When the
biggest shopping centre in Upper Silesia e the Silesia City Centre e
was opened in 2005 on the site of a former mine, although most of
the mining facilities and buildings were demolished, a few elements
recalling the former mine such as the ‘Jerzy’ shaft, its engine house
and a boiler house remained as the last reference to the historic
landscape of the area. In that sense the global retail landscape has
tried to emphasise its commitment to the local. As in other parts of
the world, so too in Katowice selected remnants of the industrial
past may be salvaged in commercial projects if investors see that
they could be used as ‘commodified quotations from a distant
modern epoch, which (.) offer a bit of nostalgia and character to an
otherwise nondescript, post-modern retail landscape’.51 Public and
civic initiatives recognising the industrial heritage of the city and
the region as central to its identity also appeared. For example,
instead of the plot initially designated for construction of the new
Silesian Museum, at the end of 2003 a larger area of the former
Katowice mine grounds on the fringe of the inner city was chosen
for museum grounds. The new museum project combines preser-
vation of important nineteenth and early twentieth-century mining
structures with building new museum facilities.
As in previous stages of the city’s history, the question of the
city centre has also returned in the post-socialist period with
several competing options. The commercial actors are keen to
proclaim the end of the traditional city centre and claim that it has
moved to the large shopping centres, as visible in the name of
‘Silesia City Centre’. The local authorities are torn between
undertaking regeneration efforts in the pre-World War I city
centre aimed at recreating a pedestrian-friendly shopping and
leisure space, and plans to create a new centre north of it alongside
Korfanty Avenue.
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Table 2
Main phases of the urban development of Katowice and changes of its landscape

Period, state
1839e1919, Prussia/
Germanya
1922e1939, Republic
of Poland
1939e1945, Germany
1945e1989, People’s
Republic of Poland
Since 1989, Republic
of Poland
a
1920e1921, under official administration of the League of Nations.
Political and
economic system
Development of
parliamentary democracy;
capitalism, monopoly
capitalism
Democracy with growing
authoritarian inclinations,
significant regional
autonomy for Silesia;
capitalism, managed
capitalism
Nazi dictatorship; German Nazi authorities
capitalism with elements of
central planning
Communism/real
socialism; centrally
planned economy
Liberal democracy;
market economy
Dominant ethnic and Functional
social groups changes
German entrepreneurs and Transformation from From rural to planned
managers, influence of a village into an urban townscape, creation of
Jewish minority in certain centre with main control a city centre
fields e.g. retail functions (company
headquarters and public
administration),
communication hub and
retail and wholesale centre
Polish administration and New important control
managerial class functions (public and
ecclesiastical
administration, company
headquarters, cultural
institutions), inclusion of
heavy industry sites into
the city
e Destruction of selected
Polish communist New important control
nomenklatura functions (headquarters of
industrial conglomerates),
growing importance of
heavy industry, emergence
of higher education
function
New Polish managerial Heavy industry
and middle class restructuring, growing
importance of service
sector, new important
control functions
Spatial changes
Inclusion of neighbouring
mono-functional industrial
settlements, new central
administrative and
residential quarter
elements of urban tissue
Enlargement of surface,
destruction of selected
elements of urban tissue,
new concept of city centre,
new large housing estates
Commercialisation of urban
space, new centres of
commercial activity, new
residential spaces
New symbols in
urban space
Main Square e
Friedrichsplatz; main
railway station; company
and bank headquarters;
Protestant and Catholic
churches; monuments to
German national heroes
and German local figures
Parliament Square; Silesian
Parliament building;
skyscrapers and other
modernist buildings;
Silesian Museum;
cathedral; monuments to
Polish national heroes
e
Palace of Youth and
Regional Recreation Park in
Stalinist years; socialist
housing estates; socialist
department stores; ‘Saucer’
concert and sports hall;
new main railway station;
monuments to
‘ideologically correct’ Polish
heroes and events (e.g.
Silesian Insurgents)
Silesian Library; Altus
skyscraper and other
commercial office
buildings; Silesia City
Centre and other shopping
centres; reinterpretation of
historic workers’ quarters
as Silesian heritage;
monuments
commemorating interwar
Polish heroes, victims and
opponents of the
communist regime

Conclusions the achievements of pervious epochs, regarded as dissonant heri-

Throughout its two centuries of urban history Katowice experi-
enced five significant turning-points linked with political and
economic changes, four of them accompanied by more or less
radical changes in the ethnic composition of the city, four linked to
important changes in the economic model, four leading to impor-
tant social changes, all having a significant impact on the cityscape
(see Table 2). Although nowadays it would be easy to say that
Katowice represents a common European heritage, at the same
time Silesian, Polish and German, its historical landscape conveys
a rather different message. Each turning-point and new develop-
ment period in the city’s history brought new dominant actors,
ideologies, functional and spatial changes, inspired the creation of
important new landscape features and symbols, and was accom-
panied by the will to destroy or at least diminish the importance of
tage.52 A certain lack of cultural continuity is thus one dis-
tinguishing and unchangable feature of Katowice e an immanent
part of its identity. As noticed by E. Chojecka, ‘Katowice has an
instinct of being modern’ and a legacy of ‘every political break-
through meaning negation of the previous epoch and its
achievements’.53
Up to 1922 Katowice was mostly a product of German culture,
whereas from 1922 to 1989 it was mainly Poles, and after 1945
only Poles, who contributed to its urban fabric and image. The
post-1989 landscape, in turn, is shaped to a large extent by local
but also increasingly global forces. Since the very beginning of its
existence as an urban centre, Katowice has thus been an arena for
a clash of identities, bestowed on it by dominating ethnic groups
such as Polish and German and dominant ideologies, whether
capitalist, Nazi, communist or neo-liberal, produced in the

52
G.J. Ashworth and J.E. Tunbridge (Eds), Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict, Chichester 1996.
53
T. Malkowski, Katowice maja˛ instynkt nowoczesnosci, Gazeta Wyborcza 10.01 (2008).
 Author's personal copy
M. Murzyn-Kupisz, K. Gwosdz / Journal of Historical Geography 37 (2011) 113e126
context of traditional, industrial and post-industrial societies. It
therefore follows that Katowice may be described rather as
a place of conflicting identities prone to breaking with the past
and only to a limited extent as the place of dialogue and common
memory.54
Such a landscape, while an interesting melange of identities, is
also hard to reinterpret for present-day purposes as no single
historical development stage offers itself as a focal point in the
construction of a contemporary identity. In the case of the
German and Jewish heritage of Katowice, in the absence of size-
able present-day minorities with such ethnic backgrounds (in
other words as there are no living ‘milieux de mémoire’), the only
‘lieux de mémoire’ that may exist are vulnerable to misunder-
standings, loss of meaning and disappearance if they are not
monumentalised or commercialised.55 Placing emphasis on the
interwar heritage in city imaging as done by some Polish cities
such as Gdynia or Stalowa Wola is also problematic, as it would
involve referring to the memories of the region’s autonomy and
could fuel the still existent autonomous claims of the Silesian
population, which would not be in line with general policies at
state level. Neither is making the heritage of real socialism a point
of reference an option. The city’s relative prosperity in the times
of real socialism and its privileged position as the centre of the
heavy industrial region may be unofficially nostalgically referred
to by some people but can hardly be voiced in post-socialist
Poland. The presence and meaning of landmarks of socialist times
in the city is thus rather ambiguous. On the one hand some of
them are rejected because of the ideological connotations, on the
other hand no explicit negation of the period of real socialism
may be observed, as other important elements of the landscape
created during that period have been stripped of their ideological
connotations.
Apart from ethnic and ideological considerations there has
always been one important reason for such negative or at best
indifferent attitudes to landscape elements produced in the past.
Unlike other industrial centres in the region, the economic
trajectory of Katowice has to a large extent been based on
developing diverse middle and high-rank service functions for the
entire industrial region. Therefore, rather than leading to a crisis
of urban functions or a decline in importance, each turning-point
in the city’s history presented an opportunity for its further
development and inspired a further rise in the urban hierarchy.
Thus each new period of development created significant new
elements of landscape to testify to new prosperity and present-
day success.
The peculiarity of Katowice’s identity development model is
reflected in three paradoxes related to the landscape of the capital
of Upper Silesia. Firstly, a side effect of the overlapping and con-
flicting identities in the city’s morphology is that although within
Katowice a sizeable area may be referred to as downtown, the city
does not have an urban space which may be termed a real city
centre, understood as the representative and symbolic heart of the
city, the hub of its activities and the meeting point of its residents.56
The ambience of the nineteenth-century market was destroyed in
the real socialist period, the interwar Silesian Parliament Square is
too monumental and official to foster real city life, the often avant-
54
C.G. Kiss, Places of common memory, in: J. Purchla (Ed.), Central Europe: New Dimension of Heritage, Krakow, 2002, 47e50.
55
See note 10.
56
T. Nawrocki, Miasto bez centrum? Centrum Katowic w oczach mieszkan
285e300.
57
Kamusella, Nation-building (note 22).
58
K. Wódz and J. Wódz, Dimensions of Silesian Identity, Katowice, 2006.
59
N. Davies and R. Moorhouse, Microcosm: a Portrait of a Central European City, London 2003; J. Purchla, Krakow in the European Core, Krakow, 2000; L. Briedis, Vilnius: City of
Strangers, Budapest, 2009.
125
garde socialist-modernist technocratic city solutions of the post-
war time are interesting. if admired from a car or, best of all, from
the air. Thus the centre of such a large urban conurbation does not
itself have a centre but rather several rival sub-centres, at present
also including the mushrooming shopping centres such as Silesia
City Centre.
Secondly, despite the fact that apart from the Nazi rule, each
development period in the city’s history created very interesting
and artistically valuable landscape features, this rich and varied
heritage has not until recently been regarded as a contemporary
development resource or a source of inspiration. There was simply
no need for it, as heritage is often discovered or referred to in times
of crisis, not in times of prosperity. With the city’s focus on the
present, the common perception of Katowice is as a city with no
valuable or important landscape elements worth underlining. The
landscape of Katowice and its specific elements is thus rather
a domain of appreciation by connoisseurs and specialists, not local
residents or authorities, while the potential of its heritage is only
slowly being discovered.
Last but not least, a singular peculiarity of Katowice is that
although it is a centre of an area perceived as a region with a strong
and separate regional e Silesian e identity, no such dimension of
identity is clearly visible in its landscape. Silesians have always
been a rather ‘silent actor’ in the shaping of the city’s landscape in
contrast to the dominating clearly defined national groups
(whether Polish or German).57 On the other hand, it would be too
easy to conclude that the Silesian identity is suppressed or under-
represented in the landscape of Katowice. There are important
reasons for this, stemming from the Silesian character itself. First of
all, Silesian identity has always been hard to express in the city-
scape as it was rather plebeian, inward and family oriented, defined
in reaction to stronger significant others (German and Polish as
well as partly Czech culture).58 It thus tends rather to be expressed
through immaterial heritage, related to the private sphere: a small
circle of family and neighbours, focused on traditions, ways of life,
mentality and traditional values (e.g. a work ethos and attachment
to faith) and hard to transpose onto the landscape. On the other
hand, there are certain symbolic landscape elements which in time
became symbols of the region, although their initial meaning was
more related to economic development and function, such as the
strong association of Silesian identity with the industrial, especially
mining landscape, or workers’ residential quarters. A good example
of this is the growing popularity of Nikiszowiec as a typical Silesian
workers’ quarter.
Katowice as a place of multiple conflicting identities is a model
Central European city, yet at the same time unique because of its
lack of nostalgia for the past. So far analysis of the landscape of
Central European cities, its meanings and links with identity, has
seemed to focus on only two types of urban centres. The first
group consists of cities universally acknowledged and recognised
as historic metropolises, possessing a rich heritage whether with
a dominant national identity or with once dissonant and currently
increasingly acknowledged multiple identities (such as Krakow,
Wroclaw Vilnius or Prague),59 making clear references to them in
present-day development strategies. The second comprises
younger, often industrial cities, developed in the nineteenth or
 ców, in: B. Ja1owiecki (Ed), Przemiany Miasta. Wokół Socjologii A. Wallisa, Warszawa, 2005,
 Author's personal copy

126 M. Murzyn-Kupisz, K. Gwosdz / Journal of Historical Geography 37 (2011) 113e126

twentieth centuries, experiencing a structural crisis, which will- Acknowledgements

ingly or not, try to deal with the crisis by looking into the past as
a point of reference (e.g. qódz, Nowa Huta).60 Katowice does not
fit into either of the above categories, and seems to be a separate
and different model of links between landscape and identity, the
‘rupture with the past’ identity model, with a multifaceted, hybrid
landscape and identity formation focused on the present and the
future.
The authors would like to sincerely thank the three anonymous
reviewers and Felix Driver for their inspiring comments and valu-
able suggestions helpful in preparing the revised version of the text.
The help of Jessica Taylor-Kucia in editing the text from linguistic
point of view is also gratefully acknowledged. The photographs in
the text were kindly provided by Marcin Kupisz.

60
Young and Kaczmarek, The socialist past (note 2); A. Stenning, Placing (post-) socialism: the making and remaking of Nowa Huta, Poland, European Journal of Urban and
Regional Studies 7, 2 (2000) 99e118.