Warsaw: Devastation, Modernization, (Re-)privatization, dérive - Zeitschrift für Stadtforschung, Heft 72 (3/2018)

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.
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 Jałowiecki –
also pose the geographical question. Jałowiecki, 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 air-conditioned 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 b
een 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 microstudies
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 Pobłocki 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.
Kacper Poblocki — WARSAW. A Taciturn City
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