Editorial

This special issue on Warsaw is the 72nd edition of dérive and the first with an editorial in English for 18 years (the German version is available on our website, derive.at). In addition to the editorial, all contributions to the focal point are in English. However, this does not mean that dérive will be available only in English in the future. The choice of language is due to the issue being produced in cooperation with the organizers of this year’s INURA conference in Warsaw, where the magazine will also be the conference reader. INURA (International Network for Urban Research and Action) is a network of international urban researchers and activists of which dérive has been a member for many years. Every year a conference takes place in a different city and is conceptualized and organized by the local INURA members. I would like to thank Kacper Pobłocki in particular for the great cooperation on the editorial work for this Warsaw issue. Kacper is not only responsible for the editorial concept, but was also – despite the time-consuming preparation for the conference – involved in the production of the issue from the initial idea to printing.

Warsaw is a city that has experienced radical breaks in its development over the last century, which are still relevant and visible in many different ways today: the Nazi occupation, the crushing of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the subsequent systematic and almost complete destruction of the city can hardly be surpassed in terms of cruel contempt for humanity. Several articles in the focal point refer to these events and their consequences, most directly a text by Bolesław Bierut from 1955, which Irena Maryniak has translated – along with others – from Polish to English for this edition of dérive.

The second major break in Warsaw’s recent urban history saw the shift from a state-socialist to capitalist system. Thereafter, the significance of property grew enormously and profit-oriented thinking made a decisive breakthrough, having a fatal effect on today’s housing market. This makes the ownership of many houses and properties a hotly contested topic, especially in connection with the (re-)privatization of property originally stolen by the Nazis. Of course, most of the buildings affected were destroyed at the end of World War II and, in many cases, the property claims pursued today have nothing to do with the original owners or their descendants. There are cases, for example, where the companies that had real estate confiscated by the National Socialists are revived simply in order to construct a claim for compensation. In the recent past, this topic has caused a stir in the media in Warsaw. Łukasz Drozda analyses the associated debate as played out in current publications. In an interview, activists of the Warsaw Tenants Association (WSL) report on the everyday and concrete effects of conflicts concerning the Warsaw housing market, which have repeatedly turned violent. In addition to the 1955 text by Bolesław Bierut, we have two further manifesto-like texts from other periods. The architects and urban planners Jan Chmielewski and Szymon Syrkus published Warsaw as a Functional City in 1934. Meanwhile, in 2006, Bohdan Jałowiecki considered whether Warsaw is in danger of becoming a Third World city.

Taken together, the three texts provide a range of reflections about the fate of Warsaw and its development through time, thus documenting various historical perspectives.
Three interviews with urban activists complement these texts. In addition to the conversation with the WSL housing activists, dérive spoke to representatives of the Open Jazdów Initiative, an organization that is determined to save a very central park-like site, and the activities that have developed there, from valorisation. The third interview is about the highly active urban grassroots movement that has established itself in Polish cities.

Chaos is a term widely used in discussions about the status of Warsaw. Joanna Kusiak focuses in her article on what the word chaos describes, how it is used, by whom and what it is meant to obfuscate. She traces an arc from Hegel to Harvey, from everyday experiences in Warsaw to the unbuilt Museum of Modern Art, and from a heterogeneous cityscape to neoliberal shock therapy.
Kacper Pobłocki has not only written an introduction to the focal point. In his contribution Salon: Domestication of Warsaw’s Public Space, Pobłocki writes about the relationship of the capital to the rest of the country, about the dominant role of the gentry in urban (class) society and how they have inscribed themselves on Warsaw’s buildings (amounting to a literal gentryfication) and, to conclude, about the function and use of public and private space between salon and socialization.

Finally, a look at the 9th urbanize! festival which will be hosted in two cities for the second time, combining theory, best practice and hands on workshops. urbanize! takes place in Berlin from 5 to 14 October and is organized collectively by a broad alliance of Berlin’s urban movements and housing initiatives in cooperation with dérive. In Vienna urbanize! will take place from 24 to 28 October at Nordbahnhalle, taking a close look at the scale of the neighborhood and its potential for citizens empowerment. Program details will be available from August on www.urbanize.at. You are welcome to join! Save the date(s)!

Our crowdlending campaign is still running for the Viennese Habitat/Mietshäusersyndikat house project Bikes and Rails, where dérive is also involved. We recently surpassed the 200,000 euro mark, which is a great success. But don’t worry, we need another 1.3 million euro. So you still have the opportunity to participate. Information is available at bikesandrails.org.

Inhalt

Editorial:
Christoph Laimer

Schwerpunkt:
Warsaw. Devastation, Modernization, (Re-)privatization.

Warsaw - A Taciturn City
Kacper Poblocki

Wild reprivatization
Lukasz Drozda

It All Started with Rage and Anger
Syrena, Cafe Kryzys, Lisa Puchner

Salon - Domestication
Kacper Poblocki

Creating spaces for free thought and free activities
Andrzej Górz, Wojtek Matejko, Lisa Puchner

The Cunning of Chaos and Its Orders
Joanna Kusiak

Urban grassroots movements in Poland
Christoph Laimer, Tymon Radwan'ski

Warsaw as a functional City
Szymon Syrkus, Jan Chmielewski

Care for the human person
Boleslaw Bierut

Is Warsaw becoming a city of the Third World?
Bohdan Jałowiecki

Kunstinsert:
Trees and Stumps
Joanna Rajkowska, Andreas Fogarasi

Besprechungen:
Otto Wagner – zweimal zum Gedenken
Peter Leeb

Architektur in der Grauzone
Gabriele Kaiser

Alle, die hier sind, sind von hier
Lilly Marie Untner

Die Rückeroberung der Stadt – aber wo ist der politische Kampf?
Sara Schmitt Pacifico, Johanna Betz

Warsaw – A Taciturn City

There are two types of cities. Some are talkative – they churn out one story after another. Denizens in New York City, Paris, Beirut or Tokyo, when asked about the city they live in, will openly and gladly tell you what makes their city special. Such narratives usually add up to a coherent picture of local urban identity. Warsaw belongs to the other group – that of taciturn cities. It does not have a predefined identity, and when asked about their city, Warsavians’ knee-jerk reaction is either to ask the outsider for their view or to change the subject.

When it does speak up, Warsaw communicates through its walls. Coming from western Poland, when I first moved to Warsaw, I was shocked by the number of plaques commemorating national figures or acts of violence committed during World War II. The city’s veneer is coated with records of historical trauma. In this sense Warsaw is the very capital of what Timothy Snyder dubbed „bloodlands“ – a vast territory „between Hitler and Stalin“ that saw the murder of some 14 million people between 1933 and 1945. Reduced to ashes in 1944, Warsaw is one of the rare cases of a city that really started anew. But everybody remembers 1 August, when year after year in what is perhaps the most Varsovian of acts, the whole city stops for a minute to commemorate the 200,000 victims of the Warsaw Uprising.

And then there is the urban fabric, which makes Warsaw so unusual that it does not resemble a proper city. It has no centre, or is in fact multicentric, with each small-scale centre being slightly off-centre. Back in the early 2000s, Warsaw was colloquially referred to as a concrete camping site. Krakow or Wroclaw – centres with a more continuous urban history and with more charm –were considered proper cities. No wonder one of the most famous music bands from Warsaw is the Warsaw Village Band. Yet, there is an order behind what seems like a random patchwork. In her essay reprinted in this issue of dérive, Joanna Kusiak shows how Warsaw’s urban fabric – elusive and nonintuitive at first glance – represents a palimpsest of many attempts to break with history. In this sense, Warsaw is a city that continuously starts anew.

While the sense of looming history is indisputable and visible in the omnipresent fingerprints of the past, the city’s chaotic geography has become the fulcrum of possibility and change. As a consequence, one of the most quintessentially Warsavian debates has been on Warsaw’s actual geographical location. The three essays we reprint here as Retroactive Manifestos attest to the eerie sense of ambiguity as to where Warsaw actually is. In their Warszawa Funkcjonalna research manifesto from 1934, Szymon Syrkus and Jan Chmielewski start their analysis from a bird’s-eye perspective, looking at the larger international flows and networks in which Warsaw is enmeshed. Their text comprises a number of consecutive analytical steps, which are also visually represented in the corresponding maps. We reprint only the first eight of those steps, but the final outcome – the Warszawa Funkcjonalna diagram – is the cartographic theory of what constitutes, to borrow David Harvey’s phrase, the „structured urban coherence“ of Warsaw.

Just ten years after Warszawa Funkcjonalna was published, Warsaw was destroyed and a new city erected in its place. Yet a comparison of a map of contemporary Warsaw with the Warszawa Funkcjonalna diagram shows that the city actually did grow according to the logic Syrkus and Chmielewski had predicted. The most traumatic of events – the Warsaw Uprising and the Nazis’ destruction of the city – did little in the way of altering Warsaw’s innate trajectory. The other two manifestos – excerpts from the 1951 book entitled The Six-year Plan for Warsaw’s Reconstruction and an essay by Bohdan Jalowiecki – also pose the geographical question. Jalowiecki, in a gesture that generated a heated debate back in 2006, argues that Warsaw is not becoming a dead ringer for a Western city but instead belongs to the family of cities from the Global South. These texts are separated by long decades and each is dedicated to a very different Warsaw. But if there is anything they have in common, then it is the sense of Warsaw being somehow out of step in terms of its geography, its actual location in the world at large.

This geographical ambiguity is a source of discontents for inhabitants (and perhaps the reason why Warsaw does not have a clear-cut identity) but represents a great opportunity for urban researchers. This is why the current issue of dérive coincides with the 28th annual conference of the International Network for Urban Research and Action (INURA). The conference will be a week-long encounter between international and local urban scholars and activists, who will – together – try to think about Warsaw’ structured coherence and answer the question of what makes it unique as a city.

Because of Warsaw’s reluctance to embrace an explicit urban self-identity, it has often been spoken about as a site where other, non-urban, processes unfold – such as a putative transition from state socialism to market capitalism. But what does labelling Warsaw a post-socialist city actually mean? Instead of defining Warsaw according to what it no longer is (a socialist city) or what, in theory, it is supposed to become (a poster child for market capitalism), we will delve into places and processes that define Warsaw’s contemporary mien. To this end, we will employ INURA’s unique conference format – talking about cities in the actual urban space and not inspecting Powerpoint slides in airconditioned rooms.

We will therefore study Warsaw from the bottom up and treat it as a theoretical clean slate. Thus, we will forget about jumbo theories and turn to elements of everyday life in Warsaw: housing, transit, labour, consumption, migration, its natures and its non-human denizens. It may turn out that, for example, the annus mirabilis of 1989 does not constitute a watershed in Warsaw’s trajectory after all. Instead, longer continuities may be at work, and more recent forces may have shaken the city to its core. On the one hand, Warszawa Funkcjonalna turned out to have been uncannily precise in defining the pattern of Warsaw’s spatial expansion, despite the dramatic intrusions that the city experienced. Conversely, Poland’s 2004 accession to the European Union ushered in flows of capital that engendered entirely new spaces as well as redefining some extant ones, substantially unsettling the city and altering its position in various networks (global, national). It may be the case that Warsaw is positioned in an entirely different place.

We hope our peripatetic intellectual experiment and the encounter between local and international researchers will reinvigorate urban theory. Walking and thinking have always been intertwined. Beginning with ancient philosophers, through Rousseau and Kierkegaard and from modernist flâneurs to urban ethnographers, many theories have originated from a surprise peripatetic discovery or a chance encounter. Recently, there has been plenty of jumbo-sized theorising about the urbanization of our planet, and we have a plethora of micro-studies either describing certain places or dissecting specific urban issues. With a few exceptions (such as Filip de Boeck’s work on Kinshasa and Hidenobu Jinnai’s work on Tokyo), we are in dire need of research that shows how various fragments are, as de Boeck put it, sutured together. When Jinnai set off to walk the streets of Tokyo in the 1980s, he probably did not expect his peregrinations to allow him to discover a planning paradigm that had never been formally expressed but in fact explains precisely how his city came about and how it works. The point of departure for Jinnai’s discovery was walking.

By the same token, a novel theory that stitches contemporary Warsaw together into a coherent whole may be just around the corner. We need only make our way there.


[Kacper Poblocki is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies at the Warsaw University. He writes about class, space and uneven development. He used to be an urban activist and led the Alliance of Urban Movements that ran in 2014 in municipal elections in eleven Polish cities. In 2017 his book Kapitalizm historia krotkiego trwania (Spatial origins of capitalism the English edition forthcoming) came out.]

dérive, Mo., 2018.07.16

16. Juli 2018 Kacper Pobłocki

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