The article describes the problem of revitalization in a central and eastern European context as an element of the picture of social change. The article recapitulates the social and the spatial experiment which started in 2005 when one of the first processes of revitalization in Poland began. The idea of the revitalization was anchored in two places. The first was the socially rooted idea of the participation of inhabitants in urban planning, based on East German experiences (support in the original context by low dedicated particularly for revitalization processes). The second was that of improving the “touristic portfolio” of the city rooted in the multicultural history of the place, and the local identity. Actions which mainly relate to communication, cultural and social initiatives turned on processes which the author called “unsuccessful gentrification.” The article attempts to identify what happened and why it happened. The investigation is based on the quantitative data from the social survey (researchers asked mostly inhabitants of the revitalized area questions), and qualitative in-depth interviews. The contextual data was taken from urban observation, the local real estate market, and public statistics.