Józefa Dietla street in Kraków has been constructed in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was a pioneering urban design solution, meant to act as a sort of ventilation duct for the city, so that its climate could be improved. An important element of this system of ventilating the city is the area currently occupied by a football pitch of the "Nadwiślan" sports club, which allows the breeze of the Vistula river into the city. This idea is evidence of the modern and forward thinking approach to urban planning in Kraków during those times. The role of Józefa Dietla street as a ventilation duct has currently been all but forgotten and is underappreciated despite the fact that the amount of air pollution in Kraków has greatly increased in comparison to the times when the street was being constructed. A measure of this disdain for the role that Józefa Dietla street and the area of the "Nadwiślan" play in keeping the sanitary conditions within the city at acceptable levels is the current layout of the area, which has significantly reduced the ventilating capacity of the street. The planned construction of a residential apartment building in place of the current football pitch will definitely hamper the capacity in which the street can be used for ventilation purposes. In this manner, the evidence of pro-ecological thinking of the urban planners of the XIX century is being wasted by their XXI century counterparts.
The essay is meant to be a reflection, a conclusion of sorts regarding the topic proposed by the organizers of the "Towards beauty." It is meant to be about the problems of introducing aesthetics to public spaces. From the point of view of many disciplines. This academic event took place in the April of 2014 at the Faculty of Law and Administration of the University of Gdańsk. The Author assumed the perspective of an architect when contemplating the problems being discussed. This approach emphasizes the role that is played by the concept of the urban landscape. The work is composed of an introduction, which illustrates the reasons for adopting this perspective. This part is followed by a classification of the stances and academic research that has been presented in the delivered lectures and essays. This generalization has the form of a typology composed of five points, which describe the general issues that were discussed. The overarching thesis of this is essay is the statement that the choice of problems that have been discussed at the conference are the result of a contemporary model of thinking about the management of space, which results from a much too liberal approach that has been adopted after the socioeconomic changes that occurred in 1989. This begs the question whether the issues that are important in the context of the aesthetics of cities are effects the causes of which could lie in society's approach to its reality. Due to the aim of this essay being a commentary on the academic event that was the Gdańsk conference and a sort of reflection on the issues that were being discussed there, the Author decided not to provide it with a conclusion at the end. The Author's comments contained in this work are only a voice in the discussion and a complementation of the opinions that have been presented during the conference. The article is supposed to elicit a familiarity with the presented issues so that the reader can form their opinions, and, what is perhaps even more important, provide the foundation for future academic discussion on the topic of the beauty of the cityscape.
Inspired by the Chicago School sociology and anthropology of Mary Douglas authors of the article show the special cultural status of new urban peripheries in comparison to villages, old urban peripheries and city centers. Critically they relate to the thesis that new urban peripheries are “cultural deserts” or “bedroom/dormitory suburbs”, considering them as a form of collective organization or sustained activity patterns that replace an original kind of culture. According to Mary Douglas villages are characterized by low level of social energy and high degree of collective control, and the city centers are characterized by high level of energy and low collective control. Referring to this classification the authors of the paper claim that new urban peripheries are characterized by both low energy and low collective control. A more detailed characterization of a new urban periphery is presented in the article on the basis of materials collected in several qualitative sociological research projects. In the light of the empirical material, it can be revealed that in new urban peripheries direct forms of collective control have been replaced by social non-interference, development of individualistic self-control and privatization of micro-spaces of living and transporting. It was noted that the intensive development of individualized outdoor activity leads to gradual formation of the new body type of a new urban periphery resident.
Self-government districts in the minds of the city residents on the example of selected districts of Cracow, The article demonstrates the problem of perception of auxiliary units of the city by its residents. The history of the creation of self-government districts in Cracow was presented, the results of the survey conducted among the residents of three districts were shown (n=1433) and they were referred to the observations of other authors outlined in the subject literature. The study revealed that the self-government districts, which have been functioning for more than a quarter of a century, are poorly embedded in the consciousness of residents and do not play a significant role in their lives. Most of the respondents were not able to give the name of their own district correctly and did not know its spatial extent. The former administrative divisions and historical settlement units (former villages) were still deeply rooted in their consciousness. Most of the respondents did not take part in public life of the districts, nor did they participate in the initiatives taken at their level.
Experiences of subregional cities in programming of urban renewal. The aim of the article is to analyze and evaluate the experience of selected subregional cities in revitalization programming. At the beginning, the strategic policy of the state towards subregional centers was defined. The guidelines from the National Spatial Development Concept, the National Urban Policy and the Strategy for Responsible Development were pointed out. Then, examine in detail the activities carried out so far in 4 cities, which as a result of the administrative reform in 1999 lost the status of the provincial city, i.e. in Ciechanów, Legnica, Piła and Przemyśl. Current documents have been characterized, in particular, the specificity of areas covered by revitalization has been described. Next, the leading directions of transformations of these areas were presented, resulting from the adopted revitalization policy. This allowed for the formulation of certain generalizations about the specificity of the process of renewal of degraded areas in subregional centers in Poland.
This introduction to the volume outlines the conception of the pedagogical city. The author stresses flows, or continuous exchange between citizens as specific to city life. Such flows concern also thinking, which contributes to the creation of a community that one may identify, afer Aristotle, as koinopolis – an educational community of shared thinking, ‘a great teacher’. Against the background of the condition of the global city, the conception of pedagogical city contributes to the theory of social pedagogy, and to the conception of pedagogy of place in particular (including urban community education). One may speak, in this context, of koinpolitanism – a trait of thinking capable of inspiring the flow of changes taking place in the cities of today. The papers collected in this volume contribute to the development of this idea.
Artykuł rozpoczyna się od rekonstrukcji dyskursu o kryzysie demokracji i reakcji wywoływanych przez ten rodzaj narracji. Następnie omówiono ideę protestu miejskiego, wskazując na dwoiste oblicze obywateli miasta i ambiwalentne reakcje miast na zjawisko dekapilaryzacji władzy. Aby ukazać złożoność i różnorodność opisywanego zagadnienia, autor przywołuje przykłady miejskiego populizmu i reakcji na to zjawisko (między innymi w miastach Polski, Kanady, Włoch, Holandii, Niemiec). Autor w tekście wskazuje, że odpowiedź miast na populizm i kryzys demokracji wzmacnia lub osłabia tendencje autorytarne, zarówno w przypadku działań instytucjonalnych (związanych z tworzeniem i realizacją lokalnej polityki), jak i pozainstytucjonalnych (związanych ze sferą aktywizmu mieszkańców).
O tym, dlaczego polskie miejscowości się wyludniają, mówi prof. Przemysław Śleszyński z Instytutu Geografii i Przestrzennego Zagospodarowania PAN w Warszawie, autor „Analizy 122 średnich miast tracących funkcje społeczno-gospodarcze”.
The article connects two issues: the city as text and neoclassical trends in urban design in the second half of the 20th century. These issues are presented on the examples of ideal cities: Washington 2000 – a design of Leon Krier, Nowa Huta and the residential complex of Ricardo Bofill in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. As a continuation of the ideal European city Shanghainese Lingang is presented designed by GMP.
Small towns are an important element of settlement network. They change their status depending on, among others, the development of industry, and changes in the transportation system. Some of them lost civic rights, then regained them, and sometimes were incorporated into the neighboring agglomerations. Some small towns have merged together to create new structures in the settlement network. This article investigates this phenomenon on the example of south-west of Poland. It was also found that in several cases, a small town subsequently separated from the urban area and created a separate urban unit of its own.
The concept of city has got broad analytical perspectives, one of them are: the structural perspective, sociological, psychological, political, cultural, industrial and also the pedagogical perspective. In opposition to the concept of city is the concept of countryside, within which the concept of nature is regarded as an idyllic place, it is the place of childhood, the place of longing, it is the lost place that has been starting to go under the knife of time since the 20s of the last century. The apotheosis of the concept of city, that is being practiced by many artists, embracing the symbolics of the concept of city by mass culture and later by popular culture, causes the necessity to take the initiative of conducting the research that would attempt to establish the identity of the concept of city in modern culture. The article attempts to specify how the concept of city functions in popular culture through the analysis of chosen texts in popular music, starting from the 50s of the XX century until the XXI century.
Artykuł poświęcony jest analizie procesu formowania i przekształcania się polskich ruchów miejskich. Autor swoje wnioski wyprowadza na bazie projektu badawczego: „Miejskie ruchy społeczne w Polsce”, w ramach którego zrealizował 30 wywiadów pogłębionych z liderami i liderkami ruchów miejskich z różnych miast. W swojej analizie autor wskazuje na dwie fazy rozwoju polskich ruchów miejskich. Pierwszą formacyjną z lat 2007–2014 zorientowaną głównie na kwestię tzw. wynajdywania miejskości oraz drugą po 2014 roku, kiedy to krystalizuje się tożsamość ruchu społecznego i zaczyna on nabierać charakteru politycznego.