In the ideological matrix of post‑World War II socialist urbanism, public space was envisioned as a monumental embodiment of collective values and state sovereignty, fully aligned with socialist realism in its aim to evoke egalitarian identity. Yet the lived reality often diverged: vast plazas and broad boulevards, conceived to represent ideological coherence, paradoxically became underutilized and socially hollow, particularly outside the symbolic central cores. The text examines how such spaces—while occupying up to a third of urban land—rarely achieved meaningful everyday use, revealing a disjunction between planned grandeur and organic urban life. In cities like Nowa Huta and parts of Berlin, the spatial logic that privileged symmetry, open voids, and monumental scale gradually yielded to semantic emptiness and cold abstraction. This tension unveils the limits of centralized design: public spaces that shape citizens from above frequently become urban fossils, evocative but inert. Still, in the post‑socialist transition, these spaces carry residual potential—they exist as symbolic containers awaiting adaptive reinvention. The article proposes that contemporary use may succeed by shifting focus from ideological staging to active repurposing, enabling citizens to reclaim spatial meaning beyond official narratives and reinvest these areas with democratic, affective, and civic life.
