Transforming Urban Heritage in Wrocław and the Sense of Belonging to Europe.

Since the fall of communism, the historical wounds of Wrocław’s urban space are subject of revisitations. Urban historic traditions and remains are valorized by ascribing certain meanings to Wrocław as a particular European landscape. These civic practices that help fill the symbolic, epistemological and emotional voids emanating from the twentieth century as age of extremes are part of a socialization process that is not uncontested. In order to understand how the difficult past and rapid urban transformation contribute to raise a sense of belonging to the European community, light is shed on the effects of Wroclław’s urban heritage managements. The case of post-1989 Wrocław is an excellent illustration of a success story of Poland’s urban transformation. Since 2016, the year Wrocław became European Capital of Culture (ECoC), the number of tourists has significantly increased. The label “Meeting Place” aims to place the city in the multi-cultural context of Central Europe and is related to the contemporary urge to re-populate cityscapes of so-called historical hubs of borderland regions where the failed diversity is mourned. Furthermore, labeling Wrocław as “City of the Dwarfs” reminds about the peaceful protests against the communist regime in the 1980s and is widely used by the city’s administration to compete on a global neoliberal market to attract visitors, investors and multinational companies. Simultaneously, in consequence of the citizen’s perception of the city’s German history as still problematic, its presence is hidden, not manifested in the first plan. The identified intersections and dissonances in the urban heritage communication strategies of Wrocław reveal (un-)shared concepts and practices and help to question the social and cultural frames, in which the European memory of difficult pasts is assembled, negotiated and, thus, transformed by self-localisation.