The past as staged-real environment: communism revisited in The Crazy Guides Communism Tours, Krakow, Poland

Through an analysis of a tourism design in Krakow Poland, The Crazy Guides Communism Tours, I wish to present one possible way of promoting a district through dealing with an unwanted past, an undesirable heritage. In this instance, it is Nowa Huta, a part of city from the unwanted past, that is revalorized partly through the construction of staged environments in real places. Such designs realize the communication potential of the situation and can change socially constructed knowledge into social (inter-) action. The Crazy Guides Communism Tours require a high level of bodily and emotional investment both from the tourists and from the guides themselves. The paper investigates the designs on a representational and an experiential level and uses field analysis to try and answer the questions if, for whom and why these tourism designs change anything.

Keywords

• staging communist heritage,
• Nowa Huta. post-1989 identity,
• experiential environments,
• local pride,
• nostalgia