An electoral marathon has been going on in Poland since last autumn, starting successively with parliamentary elections, local elections and, in June, the elections to the Europarliament, They differ from each other in their propaganda messages to potential voters.
In the latter campaign, one could hear, on the one hand, Euro-enthusiastic slogans about our role and importance in the European Union, guarantees of security, democracy and prospects for an influx of investment and financial resources. On the other hand, there were skeptical slogans about threats to sovereignty, halting economic growth, and the subjugation of the country to the domination of the Brussels bureaucracy.
These slogans and demands are nothing new in Europe, and are used more for current internal political games than genuinely thoughtful forward-looking actions. The UK's Brexit, in which the public's final decision came as a relatively big surprise to politicians embroiled in local disputes, was clear evidence of this. It seems that both narratives express not so much a thoughtful relationship with the European Union as they illustrate our complexes, incidentally, which have been pervading since the 19th century. Nor do they affect public support for our membership in the EU reaching over 70 percent.
One thing that all these campaigns have in common is a complete lack of reference to the spatial development of our country, as if it were a complete vacuum, unworthy of the attention of politicians and their electorates. However, Europe is a physical space and the people who inhabit and create it, not more or less catchy political slogans. It is a space that has been shaped for almost three millennia by the generations that made up European civilization, and in the case of our country for a thousand years. In relation to this material heritage, these electoral slogans sound at least frivolous, not to say downright ridiculous. Besides, no one and no grouping refers to this material heritage as if it were unimportant and can be ignored. In the program slogans, one can hear demands to catch up with Western European countries in terms of GDP, income and wages of citizens, quality of life, but the demand for quality of space is not worthy of attention. Overlooked is the obvious fact that European space is not a historical open-air museum, but a living value to which every modern community should add new values. This aspect, not of geographic or demographic affiliation, but of contribution to material culture somehow resonates poorly with us.
our europeanness
Somehow, being no longer geographically, but in a real way a member of Europe, we have forgotten that basically everything that happened positively in our space over the past centuries, we owe to the implementation of European patterns. It occurred in varying intensity and with some delay, however, it was always parallel to European trends. The monuments of our architecture, palaces, castles, churches, cathedrals, have always been in line with European stylistic trends. They were either transpositions, such as our brick Gothic, or almost pure imports of patterns, such as the Sigismund Chapel, the Wawel courtyard, or Baroque Jesuit churches.
Similarly, modern trends headed by modernism made a very rapid appearance in interwar Poland. Fragments of Gdynia and Katowice with modernist buildings are proudly inscribed today in the tourist trails of interwar modernism. Also the post-war architecture of our country until the early 1990s, with the exception of the imposed period of Socialist Realism, admittedly under very difficult conditions and unfortunately in only a few realizations, established a dialogue with European modernism. Similarly, in recent decades, after years of decline, Polish architecture not only draws on the threads of European architecture, but also after years of isolation, objects of prominent European and foreign architects such as Arata Isozaki, Norman Foster, Daniel Libeskind are realized in our country. It is worth mentioning that the Philharmonic building in Szczecin by Fabrizio Barozzi and Alberto Veiga won the prestigious Mies van der Rohe award in 2015, as the only one to date of Polish architectural realizations.
So it would seem that there is no problem, and after years of isolation, we have become part of Europe again in the field of architecture. However, the quality of space does not consist of juxtaposed separated buildings, even of high quality. The culture of European space, including Polish, is the centuries-old art of building, expanding and transforming cities. The spatial structure of our historic cities, based on locations under Magdeburg, Chelmno, Środa or Flemish laws, is, on an urban scale, an obvious example of the use of European models. Unfortunately, with the gradual collapse of the First Republic, when modern European urban planning was taking shape, there was a gradual move away from European trends. However, also at that time there were attempts to create great assumptions like the Saska and Stanislawowska Axis in Warsaw. The period of partitions and loss of independence did not break the links with European trends. Large areas and districts of our cities, especially in the Prussian and Austrian partitions, were built in accordance with the then prevailing trends radiating from Vienna and Berlin. In the reborn Second Polish Republic, reference was made almost immediately to European trends, as can be seen in the urban planning of Gdynia, the southern districts of Katowice and Warsaw's Żoliborz.
Unfortunately, the post-1945 period interrupted these integral relationships for decades. The imposed socialist realist urbanism completely programmatically cut itself off from progressive European trends, imposing foreign Soviet models. The perception of space only as a field for the realization of the ideological assumptions of communism during the Gomulka and Gierek periods, with clumsy apartment blocks, environmental devastation and contempt for tradition, created not only a bleak image of the country's space, but, worse, established in the public consciousness that the quality of space is something irrelevant and unimportant to the quality of life. It seems that the odium of such a collective consciousness persists to this day, despite the fact that the generation in our country that does not remember communism is growing in number. This is one of the reasons that the current space of our country in both the material and consciousness areas is moving further and further away from Europe.
There has been no discussion of how to implement the Green Deal in Poland, in a way that makes sense for our circumstances; an initiative that is admittedly subject to excessive bureaucratization that obscures its ideological sense, while it has been resisted with great zeal and in an equally unreflective manner.
We have forgotten that the quality of space management is an element of the level of civilization, both of a country and in the broader horizon of European culture.
non-European space
Without getting into election slogans, which by their very nature operate with a simplistic narrative and message, it is worth tracing a segment of our activities in the area of spatial policy and management and considering whether they are part of European aspirations, or on the contrary and are a manifestation of some imaginary false national pride. Although this is just a slice of domestic reality, it is nevertheless important, because spatial development is always a material documentation of the will, aspirations and actions of a community.
Unfortunately, the experience of the last 30 years vividly illustrates that we have completely failed to deal with this problem. The imperfect 1994 Building Law with its multiple amendments, the Law on Planning and Zoning, the failure of the Architectural and Building Code are all documentation of the disasters in attempts to introduce spatial order. In addition, successive rulings by administrative courts on the lack of necessity for the compatibility of the zoning code with the study of conditions, lex developer, or the release from the jurisdiction of architectural and construction administration bodies of houses up to 75 square meters spoiling these already flawed regulations, effectively undermined their effectiveness.
One may be concerned that such a "lockbox" enabling voluntarism will also turn out to be in the new law on planning and zoning ZPI intended to open up operational urbanism. In successive but consistent steps, we have eliminated the concept of urbanism in both real and formal-legal terms. Not only was this fundamental concept for the creation of space eliminated from legal acts, but also some of the universities with departments of architecture and urban planning deleted urbanism in their names with full knowledge. Language shapes our consciousness to a great extent. The elimination of concepts not only has a linguistic dimension, it also generates a state of mind. Currently, we are a country that has consciously decided that urbanism is something unnecessary. Thus, the concept of urbanism has even moved into the metaphysical realm. One may hear that replacing urban planning with the concept of urban planning covers a broader area and is a more useful tool, but eliminating the intermediate link between urban planning and architecture results in what we have today, which is ubiquitous spatial chaos. The result is that with the progressive degradation of the profession of architecture and urban planning, already a dying profession, we are contributing absolutely nothing to the culture of European space. It can be hypothesized that in view of the helplessness with the problems of our space, it would be beneficial to stop domestic legislative activity and entrust this field in its entirety, both in terms of lawmaking and application, to some external European commission. Perhaps it would indeed be better to stop inventing yet another new legislation in the field of land use, urban planning, urban planning and architecture, and either import it (although we will certainly mess it up very quickly), or submit to an external European jurisdiction in this area. Perhaps only an external entity would be able to conduct a stable and consistent spatial policy and counteract the current voluntarism. This is, unfortunately, a sarcastic joke, but appropriate to the situation we have been in for the past 30 years. I guess as a society we are not yet at the stage of making and accepting our own stable policies like in Germany or the Netherlands. Despite a huge leap in the quality of architecture and building technology, we have not been able to overcome after more than thirty years the communist sloppiness, sloppiness, and ad hocness in shaping the space of both our cities and the open landscape. While in other areas of the economy and social life the elements of the communist system have been successfully overcome, in terms of the shaping of our space the resistance of matter and consciousness of both the authorities and society has proved downright impossible to overcome.
Instead of a sterile and unproductive discussion between Euro-enthusiasm and Euro-skepticism, it is worthwhile, at least in the field of spatial management, to show the will and take action in accordance with our aspirations to be a truly European country and to inscribe our space in this European civilization area. No one else will do it for us.
Piotr Średniawa
Chairman of the Council of the Silesian Chamber of Architects,
Member of the WKUA and MKUA in Katowice,
Since 2003 he has been running, with Barbara Średniawa, the Office of Studies and Projects in Gliwice
