The article concerns the process of forming of the population of Wroclaw after WWII. The main purpose for the author was tracing the roots of the change of, at first, amorphous and atomized mass into a society that, in a general feeling, was, as for conditions of real socialism, open and tolerant. The basic source were data about three social groups, essential for the city population structure - factory workers, industrial administrative and technical staff and students. As for the first group there are data about 5733 physical workers of two factories, who started working in Wroclaw in the years 1945-1950. As for the second group there are files of 511 persons. Students are a specific group. Only 5208 of them were analyzed, they started studying in the years 1947-1950 at the private Higher School of Commerce - paying fees. Uniqueness of the student group comes from the fact that most of them were mature and usually already worked. In general there are data about 11 452 people, e. g. 3,7% of all inhabitants in December 1950. These data make research and correlations of many social and demographic features possible. The author proposed a hypothesis that the origins of the present day characteristics of people living in Wroclaw derive from the personality traits of the first generation of the city inhabitants: active people, inclined to take risk, looking for better living conditions for themselves and their children; they were young and mobile, easily adapted to new conditions. It can be assumed that next generations of the inhabitants of Wroclaw, the children and grandchildren of the first settlers, 'inherited' their qualities in a natural way. It is a matter of fact that Wroclaw already at the end of 1950s became a centre of the Polish counterculture and avant-garde and its residents were regarded, certainly in a micro scale, taking into account the specific conditions of the communist state, as 'an open society'.
Between 1945 and 1989 some tens or even some hundreds new projects of the new metropolitan Wroclaw were drawn up - for the center, for individual districts, as well as comprehensive plans of the city. Post-war projects discussed by the author were not carried out mainly because of economic restrictions - there was first of all need to built houses, not 'a city of the future'. Today those, not carried out and perhaps a bit utopian, visions provide knowledge about the architects and urbanists who wanted to create the new Wroclaw - a place full of sun light and glass, where inhabitants could walk in the green belts and streets full of high speed cars. The purpose of those projects was also to integrate particular parts of the city, creating the urban area in places where it disappeared as the result of the War. This comprehensive thinking about the urban space is the most important value of the forgotten projects, because not only skyscrapers are the evidence of the metropolitan character of the city, but just the ability to join architecture and town planning and to compose buildings, streets and squares in a harmonious way.
The history of post-war Wroclaw distinctly presents both extreme and dramatic experience of the small communities of East-Central Europe in consequence of World War II. It is still possible to see somewhat cosmopolitan features in landscape of the city, a mixture of various long-term ethnic, national, religious and cultural influences - Czech, German, Polish, Lusatian and Jewish. Nevertheless, for near one and a half centuries, until the end of World War II, the Prussian-German tradition remained a dominant of the local identity. Post-war order ended the continuity of historic development of Wroclaw that became part of Poland. The essence of such a sudden change without a precedent in the history of these lands, was an almost complete exchange of population, Poles replaced the Germans. Polish immigrants presented a regional mosaic, with soundly stressed intergroup separatisms and antagonisms. In this situation a complicated, long-lasting process of integration and adaptation was a condition for restoring a certain community in city. The taming of the foreign city required a new version of a local history that was a subject to mythologisation, that was deprived of the German elements and glorified the tradition of the Piast dynasty as clearly Polish. Interaction between regionalisms, cultural heritage, and the great symbols of the Eastern Poland brought by the people, and post-German material heritage, constituted a specific capital of the city. Unfortunately, a communist orthodoxy contributed to the disruption of these processes and prevented the creating of a specifically original identity that would strengthen the sense of belonging to the city population. Wroclaw, for decades chronically underinvested and degraded materially, became inevitably provincial. Return to the idea of regionalism came in 1900s together with the transformation of the political and economic system. Finally thanks to the support of the local authorities the importance history of Silesia, Wroclaw and local culture for building local identity, was fully accepted.
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