The article treats about a cultural landscape of the Nowy Dwór housing estate in Wrocław. Since its formation in 1938, the very estate has undergone deep topographic and ideologic changes: from the “racially elite” community at the time of national socialism, an “industrial colony” in socialism to the tower block it is nowadays. The aim of considerations on the past and present landscape of the housing estate is to understand the co-relations happening between people and the place of their inhabitance as a cultural phenomenon, and including it in a broader trend of cultural studies dealing with the places of memory, collective memory and cultural landscape.

The world has been experiencing the era of commemoration for several decades. The events and heroes, usually doomed to oblivion until recently, are being commemorated. Many monuments appear out of an initiative of social committees. Monuments create places important for towns in which social memory is celebrated. They are an affective reference to the past and a material basis of remembering. They bring the images of the past back, facilitate remembering, as well as judge the events and establish the heroes and anti-heroes of the history. Nowadays, a traditional approach to public monuments, marked by respect, are accompanied by unconventional forms of their usage, revealing the idea crisis of such monuments as sanctified places of memory.

The article treats about a cultural landscape of the Nowy Dwór housing estate in Wrocław. Since its formation in 1938, the very estate has undergone deep topographic and ideologic changes: from the “racially elite” community at the time of national socialism, an “industrial colony” in socialism to the tower block it is nowadays. The aim of considerations on the past and present landscape of the housing estate is to understand the co-relations happening between people and the place of their inhabitance as a cultural phenomenon, and including it in a broader trend of cultural studies dealing with the places of memory, collective memory and cultural landscape.

Immeasurable symbolic values of a local space constitute the basis and motive for designing mental maps. Mental maps consist of universal elements (e.g. communication paths, area borders) and particular geographical categories (e.g. world directions, known and characteristic towns). The latter are the centre of connotations, and the source of metaphors for characterising local cultural areas at the level of mental maps. The analysis of Bielsko-Biała reveals representations of this town as Manchester, Vienna, and Berlin, as well as the representations of the fragments of spaces of other town such as Paris and New York. In each scale and in each case, mental maps reflect the socio-cultural characteristic of the local space.

The aim of the article is to discuss the processes of continuity and change that take place within the space of an industrial town, connected with the functioning of their cultural areas. The subject of interest is the process of creating qualitatively new cultural areas, changes of perception and valorization of socially degraded and empty cultural areas that are being ascribed new functions and meanings, as well as the development, maintenance and proper development of historical cultural areas of an industrial town, constituting the cultural heritage of this category of centres. The phenomenon of changes and valorization, was analysed on the example of the processes taking places in three towns, constituting the composition of the Upper-Silesian aglomeration, namely Bytom, Ruda Śląska and Zabrze.

The aim of the article is to show the relationship between the Zandek housing estate and the community inhabiting it. Concentrating workers of Donnersamck steelwork, it used to be a perfectly functioning space of inhabitance. Nowadays, the inhabitants form a culturally diversified system. The problems are standard flats and social pathology. Though, it used to be the place of a specific culture. Today Zandek can be considered a cultural area because of the monuments placed here and an active nature of enthusiasts. Tradition, closed in the inhabitance space, helps to look for an identity and meet the needs of living in a safe and healthy environment. It is a factor stimulating the formation of formal societies that have a positive influence on the whole local community.

A change concerning a paradigm of perceiving an industrial local space has taken place for the period of the last twenty years. The very phenomenon happens not only in Poland , but also all over Europe, the example of which might be such places as the Slovenian Stara Elektrarna, Estonian Kanuti Gildi SaaL centre, Warsaw Stara Papiernia centre, Wałbrzych “Julia” or Bytom “Rozbark” Coal Mines. The artistic movement developing there takes over postindustrial objects transforming them into cultural centres. Thanks to revitalization, the restoration of towns aiming at transforming the buildings that are no longer used into dynamically developing cultural institutions. The aim of the article is to bring the changes of former “Rozbark” Coal Mine and Silesian Dance Theatre in Bytom closer.

The advertisements of new housing estates convince us of a new quality of the flat environment. The aim of the text is to present a cultural image of new housing estates of blocks of flats built after 2000. A dominant organizational form are housing cooperatives there. They were described through the prism of the organizational culture. The analysis of the content of opinions on the housing cooperative Internet fora was made, namely the analysis of the topics important for inhabitants, methods of their joint actions, norms binding in these communities and ways of taking social control. The studies included 30 opinions from the housing cooperative Internet fora from Gdańsk, Poznań, Warsaw, Wrocław and Łódź.

One of the forms of popularising the knoweldge on the past is local historical performances. They are ludic in character, but also perform didactic functions with regard to a younger and older generation. They transmit patriotic information in an attractive form, and influence the process of shaping a historical awareness of Poles. The historical performances presented in the article show the history of Cracow. They are very popular among the inhabitants, though, arouse some concern, too. They are an example of the trivialization of scientific knowledge that is more and more often serving the role of fun. Its ludic, popcultural presentation has become a fairly unquestionably used canon of pedagogy these days. Historical performances seem to be yet another piece of evidence of the cumulation of the process of making modern culture more ludic.

The aim of considerations is the analysis of the cultural space of neighbouring places situated in central Slovakia, namely Banska Bystrica and Zvolen. Basing on historical and ethnographic data the attempt was made to show the existence of various types of borders between the centers in question (a geographic, political, economic, economic, cultural and linguistic one). The emptirical studies assumed that the way of perceiving and interpreting the influence of the the very borders on people’s daily life, as well as their former and current influence on the local / town identity of inhabitants will be captured. The emphasis was put on presenting the actions of the inhabitants having a competitive and cooperative nature that have shaped the present-day economic, social and cultural needs, as well as the influence of a domestic and local politics aiming at forming one regional centre.

The article brings the Polish-Chinese relations being the result of the economic cooperation between the authorities of Jaworzno and Chinese investors since 2010 closer. The biggest Poland International Trade Centre (SCC) in southern Poland was created in Jaworzno. The aim of the research was an attempt to answer the following questions: 1) how did the Polish-Chinese neighbourhood influence the reorganization of Jaworzno?, 2) what was the source of creating stereotypes and local legends?, 3) what influence did it have on the quality of the neighbourhood?, 4) how did the Chinese adapt to the local social system?, and 5) how do the inhabitants of Jaworzno evaluate and adjust to the changes taking into account their fears, and hopes connected with the appearance of the emigrants of the Chinese origin?

 A conclusion deriving from an attempt at “inscribing” the phenomenon of immigration into a local space, is the existence of an inseparable relationship between them. Territory segregation is used as a tool levelling social tension against an ethnic background. Immigrants usually inhabit postindustrial, and poor districts offering low standard flats in the local structure. In the case of the Polish immigrants in Holland, it is reflected in the phenomenon called Polenhotels, namely housing estates created on the basis of former monasteries, institutions for the handicapped or army storehouses where they are accommodated. Ghettoization locates particular groups of people (not only in a physical, but also discursive dimension) in a marginal position.