The heart of Nowa Huta and the showpiece of Poland's most complete piece of Socialist Realist town planning. Laid out from 1949, the square is a vast pentagonal space from which five broad avenues radiate like the spokes of a half-wheel, framed by monumental apartment blocks whose arcaded ground floors and Renaissance-borrowed proportions dress communist housing in the clothes of a classical city.
The scale is deliberately overwhelming — this was built as a model proletarian capital, a counterweight to bourgeois, Catholic Krakow — and it reads far better in person than in photographs. Officially renamed after Ronald Reagan in 2004, a small irony the locals enjoy, the square is the obvious place to begin a walk through the district. From here Aleja Róż, the "Avenue of Roses", runs north past more of the grandiose blocks; the whole ensemble is best appreciated slowly, on foot, with an eye for the propaganda built into the stonework.