Pharmakos 10. rule and share power! The city is the field of activity of courageous people
Instead of mayors and presidents running all over the city, constantly documenting their actions on social media, I would rather see local government politicians deliberating with advisors on important issues for the community. Important decisions need adequate time for reflection. Time to prepare analytical material. Decisions cannot be made in a hurry, under time pressure, without listening to the voice of advisors and experts in the field. You can't manage the city without supporting decisions with the voice of residents in carefully prepared consultations. Time is also needed for rest, relaxation and recuperation after intellectually exhausting deliberations and analyses of urban problems. Culture, art, hygiene, economics, health, management, planning and other elements described in DecaPharmakos of the City should be focused in the office of a modern city manager with the courage to meet all the challenges of the fragmented and dispersed reality of the parallel societies of late modernity. In particular, the "society of fatigue."
III Towards a modern industrial city—conclusion
The architect of the City of Rzeszow, Janusz Sepiol, in his speech to the young architects of SARP U40 in Rzeszow, succinctly formulated the role of utopian or futuristic visions of the cities of the future as an important element of the real discourse on the real challenges faced by the communities of modern polis. Without garden cities, ideal cities, the functionalized city, there would be no solutions to specific human needs in terms of infrastructure, housing, recreation or transportation. Łódź is a city far from any utopia or ideal, unless... we look at it in a completely different way. As Janusz Sepiol suggests, by taking an analytical approach to utopian visions or unrealistic myths, we can see the outline of a vision of reality. Isn't the chaotic shuffled structure of Łódź an ideal tissue for the implementation of the most contemporary postulates of an industrial city, in which places of work and residence or recreation exist in a single tissue? Isn't it ideally suited to implement the postulate of returning industry to the city center, still having reserves in its density? Modern low- or zero-emission industry. Doesn't it have reserves for green space and recreation, or even increasing the density of the building fabric through the construction of new buildings? Isn't its 19th-century downtown urbanism built mainly of a dense grid of streets and a sea of townhouses the "ideal city" called for by Rob and Léon Krier? Is it not a polis for conservative and progressive philosophers as an agora for the clash of ideas about modern society? If it is not even that city of rhetorical questions, it may be the city of modern thought of contemporary discourse, where the cultural threads of a rich history, the difficult experience of vibrant early capitalism, the neoliberal experiment of shock therapy of the market economy on the body of a post-communist-bourgeois hybrid are intertwined. A city of underground art and entertainment. A city of modern scientific and intellectual thought. A city that manages to break the crisis of a society of fatigue, burnout, surveillance and transparency. A city of the real. A city of courageous people. A city that can be loved and hated, but one cannot remain indifferent to it. A city that is already the best Łódź has ever been. City I hate. City I love.
