Hi debt-ridden impoverished middle class. We'll start out cheerfully, but I promise you that throughout this long text we'll slowly roll to the bottom of the cavern of despondency, issuing more and more threatening murmurs along the way, to finally plunge under my instructor's watchful eye into the lake of black despair.
Today, for the sake of entertainment, I decided to show you what real estate developer prestige and urban splendor is all about. Let's start with the fact that it's certainly not about giving people like us, who are breathlessly running up escalators going in the opposite direction with their mortgages, a place to live. Don't even make me laugh. What's the idea at all. Apartments to apartments is a hoopla these days. If you have to live in your apartment, it means you are poor, and this already naturally excludes itself from chic and elegance. Only investment apartments are truly fashionable. After all, no self-respecting investor building in a prestigious location will advertise like some shelter or single mother's home with the slogan "Come live with us." Because what's the point? Some children on playgrounds, elderly people lugging nets of jars from the basement, angry neighbors with barking mutts. Where? In a residential area? What use is that to anyone? Residents are unnecessary ballast that only reduce the value of the property and burden the renovation fund. This is now being abandoned. After all, you don't buy an entire floor in a hyper-attractive apartment building for cash to have some residents wandering around. What sense would that make. That's why today developers who are trying to build their brand and recognition advertise "Invest with us". You won't be able to live here anyway, because the investment property in the most expensive and attractive part of the city, so most apartments immediately land on bookingcom, to be filled with hordes of singing Germans, Englishmen and Norwegians at most weekends. This basically determines the future fate of such an estate, and today I will tell you about just such a place.
Bookingcom Island. I coined such a term a few years ago, when in the very center of the historic downtown of Gdansk, on the so-called Granary Island, the last survivors of the Wehrmacht who were hiding there after the war were chased away, which finally made it possible, after eighty years, to begin reconstruction. Granary Island is divided into several parts with many functions intertwined, but the general consensus was that it was overwhelmingly destined to become the new residential cell of this organism, bringing life to a generally aging and dramatically rapidly depopulating downtown.
I make no secret of the fact that, as a local patriot and enthusiast who devoted the topic of his thesis to this place twenty years ago, I naively believed that this would happen. What could go wrong, after all, in a neighborhood under the protection of a conservation officer, where urban planning is dictated one hundred percent by the historical layout, while thelocal plans are the result of in-depth consultations, competitions and well over fifty years of study, and compared to the ruins standing there for half a century, well, it can't be fucked up too badly anymore.
Today, after just a couple of years since the lion's share of this prosperity stands, I decided to do my own consumer test and investigate what kind of extraordinary life has blossomed in this brand new residential area in the center of the city. So please make yourself a coffeeshop, sit back in your armchair and mentally prepare yourself for intellectual harakiri, because I am taking you to Bookingcom Island where neither laws weigh nor justice takes place.
However, we won't be watching here tasteful frames covering entire facades of neo-posters in an impossibly fishy manner, where the points of confluence of vertical lines have been murdered to emphasize ascetic architectural chic. People don't see the world like architects do in visualizations. They don't encompass the entire block with their eyes in cramped streets like in pictures from a board report to investors. Nor do they live exclusively by spectacular frames in which the play of materials sculpts perfect Fibonacci Sequences. Let's break away from the fetish of static visuals and architectural photography, because they only serve to falsify the image of public spaces. Let' s look instead at what happens in the real human world, where the same spaces, however, often appear to us as a mere mess. Therefore, we will examine for ourselves all those places where we as humans can interact with architecture, touch it, feel it, lick it, listen to it and see what it smells like. In a word, a sensual-organoleptic test of a connoisseur of life on the first floor of this city.
However, first things first. What it looks like geographically.Generally, Downtown Gdansk is divided into different areas of social destruction, but today we will deal with Bookingcom Island, and for a better orientation of you and yours shown in thethe context of the all-too-familiar tourist Death Zone, also known as "starufka," and actually called the Main City, which lends itself to a separate episode of this drama and we will not deal with it today.
Gdansk's Bookingcom Island, or Granary Island
By Paweł Mrozek
Let's start, however, perhaps, with what has been successful. The first development, Chmielna Park, was initially even still at as-yet humane prices. Admittedly, they were three times higher than in other parts of the city at the time, but if I tell you that it settled at around 6 thousand. per square meter, many of you will probably wipe a tear out of the corner of your eye at this news with a shrug, because with the prices present in the area, "if you ask me, it means you can't afford it," it was not much different in fact from giving away apartments for free in front of developers. Surely, if these companies knew how staggeringly successful they could be on a speculative housing pyramid, they would have bought them from themselves after they were built. Well, but so they had to be bought by investment funds, speculators, companies looking for a place to invest their capital, and sometimes some families who didn't understand the joke of the neighborhood and decided to live there after all.
Gdansk's Bookingcom Island, or Granary Island
photo: Pawel Mrozek
As befits an exclusive historic district, the public spaces were the result, euphemistically speaking, of a compromise between utilitarian convenience and a "who cares" approach. On the one hand, the street surfaces had to be historically grandfathered, but on the other hand, you could make your own forecourts for it, and the Death Zone also gladly took advantage of the lack of residents, developing all the remaining space into a parking orgy. Well, but nevertheless some life began to appear, so let's consider it a plus. A strange start for a luxury district that was supposed to show us how it should be, but still.
Gdansk's Bookingcom Island, or Granary Island
photo: Pawel Mrozek
Gdansk's Bookingcom Island, or Granary Island
photo: Paweł Mrozek
My words about what I wrote earlier still resonate in my imagination, that since we have good local plans and a conservator on our backs what can go wrong. Screw the preservationist, they are never guided by utilitarian or aesthetic considerations (look at the cat heads, tree cutting and concrete markets), but local plans to let us down like that? I know, I know. And I can feel your crystallizing laughter on my temples right now, but believe me, a well-constructed local plan is one that we would expect to protect the designation and composition in those most important public spaces in its area. It may not be that good in that case. Let's check it out. Let's consider what the most important spaces might be in a place that is an island. Yes, yes. So I invite you, let's take a walk by the water.
Gdansk's Bookingcom Island, or Granary Island
photo: Paweł Mrozek
Gdansk Bookingcom Island, or Granary Island
photo: Pawel Mrozek
Gdansk Bookingcom Island, or Granary Island.
photo: Paweł Mrozek
Gdansk Bookingcom Island, or Granary Island.
photo: Pawel Mrozek
Yes, you see right. Waterfont in the center of a European city is the perfect place for trash, parking, weeds and garage exits. I'm sorry, but if you were hoping for dancing boulevards and crowds of strollers, it's nothing of the sort. Where was the conservationist, where were his parents? Not even close, probably, but according to conservationists, Granary Island as a mainly industrial area before the war, where horse-drawn carts with depressing goods were pulled along the quays, was a place of uninteresting utilitarian Dantean scenes, and we should not expect that it must be better now. It is uninteresting, so it is in keeping with the history of the place. So what? You guys probably expect a pleasant public space by the water in the historic center of the city? What kind of space? Hello sorry. There has never been such a thing there. And the local plan you ask? Muhahaha. And what local plan? A local plan can't force you to do anything, after all, any diligent disciple of Leszek Balcerowicz will tell you that "overregulated plans are evil itself" well, and pfff... and by the way, a plan, after all, allows investors to create a good space. Just like, by the way, a monkey with a razor, when we give it total freedom it has a chance to shave us professionally.
Gdansk's Bookingcom Island, or Granary Island
photo: Pawel Mrozek
Although goodness and beauty don't have the stamp of approval for documentation, after all, we know that elsewhere it does. In a normal civilized world, this place would be a boulevard bringing in crores for this city, but it's a wilderness place, crisscrossed from time to time with fences to keep people from loitering, andthey are roaming anyway, even though we didn't make sidewalks and even though we made rental units on the first floor, so that they would roam after all, so we ourselves don't know what we had in mind. "Enyla" however, no one rented these premises, because it's a duplex site so we lose after all. What ... here ... happened? About mammuni. We must go deeper.
Gdansk's Bookingcom Island, or Granary Island.
Photo: Pawel Mrozek
The problem is that in a neighborhood where you have residents who vote, the city authorities have to be at least minimally concerned if someone reports to them the elementary shortcomings of the surrounding world. They have to respond somehow and solicit the voter. Well, then, what is wrong here that this problem has solved in a different way? I already explain. Let's start with the fact that there are no residents here. As befits investment apartments, in which the buyer buys a stake in a property that is residential in name only and entrusts the operation to a company that operates para-hotel ventures, thechance of finding a constituent, or at least a person who can speak Polish, in such a neighborhood borders on the chance of ordering an Uber on New Year's Eve after midnight. To visualize this to you, I will quote a small parable from my experience.
In my association, FRAG, in the early days of Civic Budgets, we were very active and often heroic in submitting applications in this plebiscite. The conditions were very liberal. It was enough to send an application with fifteen signatures of residents by midnight mail by the deadline. Being based in the Main City near the arch-rival post office that was open just until midnight, once upon a time we got together to throw one more application and send it with the date as the clerk commanded. About ten of us gathered, but we were still missing some five signatures. So we went to Danzig's famous Dluga Street in several groups with letters to quickly persuade someone to submit those few missing signatures, because there were crowds of people there after all. And it wasn't even a tourist peak at all, just some kind of spring. For two hours of accosting people in the center of a large city, we didn't manage to meet even a few of its residents, despite the fact that we were washed over by hundreds of passersby per minute the whole time. We rubbed our eyes in disbelief. I think that's when it first came to me so strongly - do you understand? Well, mind you, it's even worse on the aforementioned Granary Island. After all, in the Main City, i.e. in the historically rebuilt so-called (I hate that word) Old Town, some residents are still there, well, and there should be at least some chance that one of them will be on the street at any given time, while on Bookingcom Island, where there are no apartments, only attractive investment properties themselves, there is no such hope. There is only the terterturnover of suitcases against the pavement in the morning and evening. This desert breeds only stones.
The sites of the parterres, say absolutely everything about the fiasco that the city, that is all of us, has suffered in creating a new residential district in the Downtown, and it is a fiasco unmatched byany other city in Poland, although arguably the things I am talking about should resonate in your imagination with the situations you associate from your experiences. However, I did my own private opinion poll, which lasted quite a long time anyway. I asked residents of various large cities, such as Krakow, Wroclaw, Poznan, whether places like Bookingocm Island occur in their area. They pointed to single developments or small clusters, but nowhere did it grow to such gargantuan proportions of a monoculture. The first floor sites show just that most clearly. This place is not set for life. If the most universal store within a kilometer radius is Zabka and there is no vegetable store, pharmacy, market, meat market, it means that something is wrong with the neighborhood. That everything has gone wrong. And yet all the establishments in the patera, however, represent something and there are a lot of them. So what?
Well, and unfortunately they are not restaurants either, as one would expect from a tourist center.
Gdansk's Bookingcom Island, or Granary Island.
photo: Pawel Mrozek
Gdansk's Bookingcom Island, or Granary Island
photo: Pawel Mrozek
Gdansk Bookingcom Island, or Granary Island.
photo: Paweł Mrozek
Gdansk Bookingcom Island, or Granary Island.
photo: Paweł Mrozek
Gdansk Bookingcom Island, or Granary Island.
photo: Paweł Mrozek
Gdansk Bookingcom Island, or Granary Island.
photo: Paweł Mrozek
Gdansk Bookingcom Island, or Granary Island.
photo: Paweł Mrozek
Gdansk Bookingcom Island, or Granary Island.
photo: Paweł Mrozek
Gdansk Bookingcom Island, or Granary Island.
photo: Pawel Mrozek
A quick inspection shows that if these partiers were to fill our Maslow's pyramid it would implode with a bang like the empty head of whoever invented it, at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
90% of the first floors are prepared only to meet two needs - hotel service for the apartments and for the tourist to slurp down percentages before bed if he feels unsatisfied after a marathon through the establishments in the neighboring "Garbage Zone." This is not what the residential area dreamed up for itself by the makers of the plans, who expected several thousand new residents there. This is what the fiasco looks like, and we must finally admit it. We have turned our homes, our places of family hearth, into currency for highly liquid speculation. We are creating residential neighborhoods for really huge amounts of money, consuming the most valuable areas of the city for them, which then become unsuitable for living, because we don't care about living just about efficiently turning real estate and being able to speculate on it.
But let's not give up. Maybe that's not the whole truth. Let's at least take a look at what it looks like around us. Maybe the spaces of the settlements are dead, but at least they are suitable to bring life to someday, somehow.
Gdansk's Bookingcom Island, or Granary Island
photo: Paweł Mrozek
Well, not so much, fences and crossed compositional axes on the borders of the development. All the public spaces ceded to the developers' shoulders finished somewhere on the fences, nothing connects to each other.
Gdansk's Bookingcom Island, or Granary Island
photo: Pawel Mrozek
All this business, by the way, can also be done online so there is no need to even be there. It's enough that the cleaning company has some kind of locked room where it can drop off buckets and mops so as not to lug them around every time. So let's agree on why we need any first floor at all. Maybe let's just do blind walls. And no sorry, we already came up with that. I return the honor.
Gdansk's Bookingcom Island, or Granary Island
Photo: Paweł Mrozek
Gdansk's Bookingcom Island, or Granary Island.
photo: Paweł Mrozek
Well, okay, how about at least some of the wider surroundings of the neighborhood? It is, after all, a historic center. There must be some demand for good space there. Well, that immediately dispels any doubts. The immediate surroundings look like they just escaped from a bombing and the only demand there is for wild parking. A large reservoir for cars and small architecture untouched by the hand of an architect since the deep communism, and all interspersed with ruins. This is so, because everything in this district was to be done by private money without the need to sway even a square from the public side. Well, and it did what it did. The only upside is that we already know it wasn't worth it.
Gdansk Bookingcom Island, or Granary Island.
photo: Paweł Mrozek
Gdansk Bookingcom Island, or Granary Island.
photo: Paweł Mrozek
However, when we try to address our despair and resentment to someone, it turns out to be nobody's fault. Every institution has its old song, which it will brush us off with. The city will say that it has done everything within the framework of the law we have, and that local plans cannot guarantee that people will live in apartments. The preservationist will say that his role is not to plan for the city and create public spaces, but to look after the character of the neighborhood, and he has fulfilled that role. The developer will say that he only sells apartments and has no influence on what the buyer will do with the apartment. They all did a great job and did their part, only the patient died.
Did that surprise us? No, because it shouldn't. Granary Island is not the first place in the world to be murdered like this. We could have learned earlier from others' mistakes and learned lessons in advance. The invisible hand of the market is not a good urban planner, it can be at most a Tokyo subway platform passenger pusher and that's all. It has been entrusted with an inadequate task, and that's how Venice, for example, was killed many years ago. It's probably hard to find a more spectacular failure in which luxury and glamour proved to be a deadly poison.
In the historic center of Venice, on all those islands, I don't know if you realize, but nobody lives. Every day, thanks to the railroad that connects Venice to the mainland, the entire staff of this circus, the employees of cafes, hotels, restaurants, players, mimes and museum workers arrive. The only people who sleep in Venice are tourists. Venice as an urban organism no longer exists. It's like Pompeii only it wasn't demolished. Instead of a volcano, it was finished off by tourism. Venice is just a dummy, a tourist enterprise. A circus for an international clientele. No conservationist, UNESCO, or local plans had a chance to prevent this. The mistake lies in something else.
They had and we today have a flawed law that gives us no tools to put out such fires. Possible arrangements in local plans or conservation decisions are like empty hydrants that can only watch this tragedy in silence.
What is needed are changes in the central law that give local governments greater authority in establishing the functional structure of developments. Allowing us to impose an obligation on the developer to transfer a portion of the units to the city enlarging the municipal resources, which the city can then transfer to the real tenants. We would have a guarantee that at least someone would live there. Why should such people live somewhere on the outskirts, only fueling suburbanization and generating even more costs for the rest?
Short-term rentals also need to be cleaned up, and not even because they wreck the functioning of residential neighborhoods, but because they compete unfairly with hotels. If we indicate in the local plans that oh here we want a hotel and there we want people to live, it's not so that there's a hotel everywhere, just one real one, and the other one a grandfathered hotel avoiding taxes because of loopholes in the law. This is fucking super stupid and shows our national mentality that we can't plan anything just "eee somehow it will happen".
Also, regulate local governments' cavalier approach to their public responsibilities, which are pushed onto the developer in the same plans. There needs to be legal rigor on these issues. If we want public spaces and boulevards, we don't do them on private owners' land charters. The agreement between the local government and the developer should be mutual. If we want him to build us roads, etc, and yet over that he gave some of the premises, then the city can't give him a slippery fish in return and then relent in English, but must step into the role of host, which it should be in this relationship, andtake it upon itself to plan and maintain the infrastructure so that it is functional, because if we leave it to the developers then we have two different sidewalks, ending up on two sides of the fence, in two different places. In the suburbs where the devil says goodnight and barbarism in space is a respected practice, this may get away with it, but in thehistoric area of Downtown after being showered with a piledriver of money, when you can still see such things, well it is, to put it mildly, out of place and a terrible testimony to us, doesn't it?
No one can save this world for us. And knowing the example of Venice or Gdansk, we should realize that there is no limit that will stop us from continuing to kill city centers. Granary Island is, in my opinion, already lost irretrievably, as is Venice, but Wroclaw or Krakow, which are very much threatened by this gnosis, can still be saved. There, life is smoldering in the center, even not bad in places. Not yet all the grandchildren have sold the apartments under their grandfathers to the whackos. Do I believe that this country will change in some thoughtful way and get better? No. But I do believe in our ability as a society to fight back and do an uphill battle against thoughtless processes and people who want to destroy our space for their profit. Don't be like Danzig. Don't let yourselves be killed. Resist. There is no alternative to this fight. This is your final warning. If you don't want to write in despair with sprays on the walls "Tourists go home" in 10, 15 years, because your city was murdered in the pursuit of money, because you became guests in your own home, we must start changing the law at the central level today. Put pressure on politicians, MPs, ministers. This is not a joke, this is not an exercise. This is how cities die. In silence and complacency. Gdansk what it was supposed to kill, it has already killed, and it is already a topic of how to revitalize this luxury now, but other cities for which there is a chance do not have to follow suit. There will always be more revitalization needs than our strength. It's a bit silly if you have to revitalize something on which billions were spent a few years earlier. We can't afford to burn money in stoves like in Qatar, so our capital must become knowledge and excellent organization. What we do today determines whether we will be in the same place fifty years from now, whether we will be a leader in quality of life.
What, in fifty years? Er. That's a good night. Nothing has happened. You can go.
Hey.
