Until the war, the city revolved around its Jagiellonian University , founded back in the fourteenth century, and its civic power was centred on the university's Catholic, conservative intelligentsia. The communist regime, wishing to break their hold, decided to graft a new working class onto the city by developing one of the largest steelworks in Europe, Nowa Huta , on the outskirts. Within a few decades its effects were apparent as the city fabric began to crumble. Consequently, in recent times, KrakA?w has been faced with intractable economic and environmental problems: how to deal with the acid rain of the steelworks, how to renovate the monuments, how to maintain jobs. Throughout the 1990s steady progress was made on environmental issues, and local initiatives in pollution reduction - combined with Western funding - mean that KrakA?w is now cleaner than it has been for decades, recent figures suggesting that air pollution levels are seventy percent below those of the mid-1980s.

Nowa Huta has played a significant role in Poland's recent political history . It was here - along with the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk - that things started to fall apart for the communist government. By the 1970s, the steelworkers had become the epitome of hostility to the state, and with the birth of Solidarity in 1980, Nowa Huta emerged as a centre of trade union agitation. Working-class unity with the city's Catholic elite was demonstrated by Solidarity's call to increase the officially restricted circulation of Tygodnik Powszechny , a KrakA?w Catholic weekly which was then the only independent newspaper in Eastern Europe. It was in KrakA?w, as much as anywhere in the country, that the new order was created, and today, it is in KrakA?w that the economic fruits of that order are most visible.