The article is from A&B issue 6|23
What challenges is the modern city facing? What is its condition from a historical-philosophical-sociological position? The problems of cities can be divided into ten main areas, depending on the causes of the crisis, and for each try to identify a solution. The author uses examples from Łódź, but they can be useful in overcoming the barriers faced by other Polish cities. Is this the direction in which modern cities should develop?
Ten diagnoses and ten prescriptions.
Jakub Krzysztofik—Architect and urban planner, born in 1973, has been running his own design practice (3DARCHITEKCI.com) since 2000. Lead designer of the urban planning concept for the area revitalization of the center of Łódź with a total area of 67.5 hectares. He is the author of many completed and award-winning buildings, such as the Old Printing House office building, the Słoneczne Tarasy apartment building, and the Laboratories of the Faculty of Environmental Protection of Łódź. After graduation, he completed doctoral studies, historic preservation, marketing and management, and a course in philosophy. Lecturer of practice and theorist of architecture. He teaches classes at the University of Łódź and the School of Art and Design, including public utilities, operational urbanism, revitalization and investment process management. Since 2019, president of the Association of Polish Architects Łódź Branch, sits on the SARP Competition Judges' Board. Member of the Program Council of the Congress Regeneration of Industrial Cities—Łódź. He writes and publishes columns in the #WritesKubaDoJakuba series on the SNG Culture portal.
I Societies of the modern city—diagnosis
modernist utopia—you know, but listen again
Back in the 20th century, architectural discourse about the future of cities was a central strand of urbanist thought. Architects outdid themselves in spinning futuristic visions, trying to predict the direction of change and influence it. Since the 19th century, these changes were stimulated by the dynamics of the Industrial Revolution, population growth and its migration to cities, and later by the development of motorization. Thus generated were the transformations of 20th century cities abounding in expressways, block housing, and the intellectual abandonment of historical cities, especially the 19th century city as an emblematic example of all pathologies with overcrowding, lack of hygiene, sanitation and greenery at the forefront. An additional catalyst for change was the two world wars, which superimposed the Cold War political dispute between capitalism and communism on the ongoing ideological discourse on urban planning. Almost until the end of the 20th century, the dynamic development of modernist cities with its typical functional division into industrial, residential and recreational zones continued. Jane Jacobs aptly summed up the dead end in which the city found itself in the 20th century in her book „The Death and Life of America's Great Cities.” This fundamentalist publication was a harsh and accurate critique of modernist methods of urban planning and redevelopment. From that moment began a slow but nevertheless clear retreat from Corbusier's vision of skyscrapers scattered among greenery toward thinking about the traditional dense street grid of the historic city.
today people are dying of overwork and depression
© Przemyslaw Gajowiak
Łódź—a city different from all others, but what kind of city? Deconstruction of a myth
Nowhere else have these transformations been seen more dynamically than in Łódź. It was here that the leapfrogging boom of the 19th century city, which had been a special economic zone for light industry since General Zajączek's decrees of 1820 and 1823, exploded. Nowhere else in the world was such a city built so quickly—in just a few decades—a city of several hundred thousand inhabitants, where palaces, townhouses, and factories intermingled to form an urban multicolored mosaic. Nowhere else, not even in New York or Manchester, were the contrasts as apparent as in our city of a thousand chimneys. Cultural and political changes following World War II contributed to a change of outlook on the orientation of Łódź's spatial development. Unfortunately, being a magnificent but unwanted cultural legacy, the „bourgeois” nineteenth-century city center was intentionally deprived of funds for the renovation of communalized tenements or the realization of new infrastructure, mainly sewage and heating networks. There is also a not insignificant sudden change in the users of the surviving buildings by the thousands. The former multi-ethnic city was populated in a few years with an incoming population, mainly from neighboring villages, permanently changing the social structure of Łódź. The old factories were exploited by the new authorities without proper investment in their material development, in modern machinery and building renovations. At the same time, on the outskirts of the city, among the fields and meadows, large modern estates and new residential districts were built. What emerged was a modernist city almost exactly as envisioned by 20th-century singers of modernity. The center was still the place testifying to Łódź's identity, it was here that the soot-black heart of the city beat shamefully, among thousands of Łódź's tenements, palaces and narrow streets. The modernist plans to rebuild the center, which involved demolishing entire frontages for more lanes of roadway, did not fully succeed. Only in places do we still see the scars that mark the new arteries and the daggers of stiletto skyscrapers. Descendants of former working-class families often continued to live in tenements and family homes, mingling with the immigrant population. But the biggest shock was yet to come—the shock therapy of the Balcerowicz reform. I will never understand why the Łódź textile workers, protesting in the 1980s in a hunger strike, so easily gave in to the neoliberal privatization of factories aimed at the ultimate collapse of light industry in Łódź. Unlike in other cities, where shipyard workers, miners, and steelworkers protested fiercely, in our city, the textile workers simply took their sewing machines home and continued to work through the night, contributing to the subsequent chaotic development of wholesale market centers near Łódź. Old factories were left to die in the fires of wild reprivatization, mercilessly demolished and looted. Downtown tenements became a zone of social crisis marked by structural unemployment, alcoholism and domestic violence.
For several decades, Łódź has been slowly rising from this slump. „A humpbacked city, but one that inspires great respect,” as Professor Boleslaw Kardaszewski, a Varsovian by birth but a Łódź resident by choice, used to say about it. This is what I found when I came to it to study. A city with enormous potential. How to describe its essence I will come to in the final part of the text. But before I do, let's try to look at the contradictions that are tearing modern urban societies apart.
ojcophilia, according to Roger Scruton, is the love of what is closest to us—interior of 3darchitekci office
photo: Jakub Krzysztofik
The dichotomies of modern society, let's try to grasp it—Byung-Chul Han's vision
It is not easy to write a prescription for the reconstruction and regeneration of a modern city, especially one as complex as Łódź. But before I try to outline DecaPharmakos For the City, I will try to outline the cultural context in which we are stuck as a society of today's cities. It is a context full of contradictions and dichotomies that often break us in half, and me personally as well, and prevent us from maintaining the proper distance to look at where we are and where we want to go. We are stuck in a constant clinch of conflicting ideas and processes, intimidated by successive waves of real and imaginary crises. Instead of solving the challenges of modern times, societies are methodically fed fears of overpopulation, the effects of global warming, pandemics, armed conflicts and, most recently, artificial intelligence. On the one hand, we have viable plans on how to address the challenges, on the other hand, we are powerless in the face of the conditions imposed by our environment: lack of time to plan, implement and, above all, evaluate the results. This deprives us of any satisfaction from action, nullifying the effects of our work and leaving us as fragmented, burned-out individuals, unable to undertake new activities.
Let's think for a moment. At the same time, we ache for an aging population and worry about the ever-increasing global population. The shrinking societies of cities, in order to compete with each other, want to increase their population, and thus increase tax revenues and grow. Scientists, on the other hand, are setting limits to environmental homeostasis and are finding that it is impossible to balance the balance of social environmental waste with current consumption of natural resources and the scale of emissions with green technologies. Another topic is the aging of the population and the spreading phobia associated with it, i.e., concern about who will work for our pensions. This is all the more strange because we are living in an era of neoliberalism, and according to the commonly accepted doctrine, if we do not take care of savings for theautumn of life or do not raise offspring who will take care of us in our old age, it is difficult to count on the care of a state torn by more and more crises and consequently weaker and weaker. Weak also by the will of its citizens who value above all their personal freedom and in successive electoral decisions reduce the tools of efficient and effective central management in favor of inefficient but democratic instruments. In addition, it surprises me that we have allowed ourselves to be told that the increase in life expectancy is a social problem. Advances in medicine and the achievements of civilization make it possible to enjoy health and life and work much longer, and this is a positive fact. However, it is not without (like every element of life) some side effects, such as the alleged conflict with the social security system.
Instead of looking for a proper solution in the situation thus outlined, we get, especially in the sphere of the discourse of ideas, absurd ideas of top-down population regulation. If our earth cannot „feed” the current population—8 billion people—this population should be reduced. This thesis is posed in the face of the development of artificial intelligence technology intended, according to Israeli thinker Yuval Noah Harari, to replace many humans, and thus make them unnecessary. How can this be done? The aforementioned author of the work „Homo Deus” answers in a recent interview: „The answer could be drugs and computer games.” Commentary seems superfluous, yet these are the words of an extremely well-read and prolific writer, developing, among other things, disturbing visions of transhumanism. And it is perhaps anxiety and fear that may be at issue here. On the other hand, the recently deceased philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, who is in conservative opposition to the progressive intellectual currents represented by Harari, among others, warns in his book „Green Philosophy” that democratic societies will reject overly oppressive climate regulations that want to force or trick them, as it were. He gives the example of the rejection of the so-called Constitution for Europe in 2005 by the leading countries of the European Union (France and the Netherlands) in popular referendums. His conclusion is this: in order to introduce effective climate regulations, they would have to be introduced by force, against the democratic mechanisms that our Western culture nurtures. Scruton does not limit himself to criticizing top-down undemocratic regulations with opaque decision-making mechanisms of non-elected officials behind them. He proposes as a remedy a vision of loving localism and taking care of one's own neighborhood, home, municipality first, and calls it paternophilia. In doing so, he points to paternophobia as a threat, which he says is a side effect of formatting society in self-hatred for the damage we do to the planet and the environment. An example from our backyard can be the question recently posed directly by Filip Springer in his lecture series „Is it worth designing?”. The context is the carbon footprint left by the erection of architectural buildings. „The construction, use and demolition of buildings is the source of 40 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, while cement production accounts for 11 percent. The building movement consumes 36 percent of the world's energy resources.” The conclusion may be surprising: architects, who in the 20th century pioneered the modernization of cities and the improvement of living conditions for residents, in the 21st century become „accomplices” to the disastrous state of our planet and should stop designing. I'll admit that in my opinion, even René Girard, creator of the concept of the „scapegoat mechanism as a cultural foundation,” probably wouldn't have gone to such radical conclusions. This is what Scruton calls paternophobia and warns of the long-term consequences of such an attitude: social aggression and interpersonal conflicts based on false ideas. And yet, at the other extreme of the discourse on cities, we talk about the fact that there is a shortage of a million and a half to a million and a half housing units in Poland, resulting in a real estate dictate by real estate developers and a frown among young people who fear they will never be able to afford their own M. To build, then, or not to build? Or maybe, as Yuval Noah Harari wants, instead of tiring of looking for breakneck solutions like Housing+, a house up to 70 sqm, Credit 2% and so on, the government should simply provide people with free access to drugs and virtual reality? Maybe this is the sought-after hypostasis, the magic wand that will solve all our problems in one fell swoop? I say no. Why? Simply because no magic wand exists, and even a child in kindergarten knows this. There are no simple solutions to complex problems. How, then, to find one's way around the urban „peaks of despair,” as Emil Cioran would probably conclude about this situation? We architects and planners are left with only blood, sweat and tears....
But before I present ten diagnoses and ten prescriptions in the form of the DecaPharmakos of the City, let me briefly introduce, for the purposes of this text, the most interesting contemporary cultural theorist in my opinion, the Korean thinker Byung-Chul Han, who writes and lives in Germany. Have you not heard of him, dear architects? Me, until recently, too. This „guru of the anthropological civilization of the city”, who doesn't even have an entry in the Polish Wikipedia, after the publication of his magnum opus, published in 2010 in Berlin entitled „Fatigue Society and Other Essays”, almost overnight became „the new star of contemporary humanities” and one of the most discussed Western intellectuals. What, then, distinguishes the thought of a Korean who is shunned by the media and the Internet? Why is he not, according to the book's translator and popularizer of Han's thought, Rafal Pokrywka, another example of a „best-selling philosopher” in the style of Slavoj Žižek or the aforementioned Harari? According to Pokrywka, perhaps the greatest value of Han's essayism is that he is able to combine ideas that are variously discussed on both the conservative and progressive sides of intellectual discourse on contemporary problems. The central concept of Han's thought is the term „society.” It is from this point that the Korean thinker is able to subject the neoliberal economy and surveillance capitalism (elements of the Left's discourse) to criticism, and at the same time advocate a return to a hierarchical community cemented by the ritual of the sacred thus saved in a profaned society (contemporary conservative demands). I believe that this viewpoint eschewing polarized discourse in favor of a multifaceted bird's-eye view of today's society may prove useful for contemporary cultural thought about the city as the natural environment of human civilization. Byung-Chul Han, like Scruton and Jane Jacobs, emphasizes the role of beauty in our culture, so profaned by the functionalized, modernist city. Han defines and describes the many parallel societies in which today's late-modern man lives. In addition to the „society of fatigue,” he describes a „society of transparency,” in which we know everything about the self-interested individual, but nothing about the decision-making mechanisms that affect his life, which are hidden in the corporate thicket of business and politics. How close this is to the social protests of urban movements demanding openness of decisions made behind the scenes. Han also describes and defines a „palliative society,” incapable of pain and suffering, living in fear of death, which is willing to accept any promise of a miracle pill to ease the pain of existence, even in the form of the promise of digital immortality, as Rafal Pokrywka aptly notes.
But what is a „fatigue society” and why is this concept so important for city planning? Here let me return to Łódź. We dream today of the myth of Łódź's splendor as the „second promised land,” meanwhile, one has to be blindfolded not to see that the Nobel Prize winner giving the „biblical title” to a novel about the city of a thousand chimneys simply made a severe mockery of the monstrous city that Łódź was at the time. A city of unimaginable exploitation, full of injustice and rape, debauchery and moral relativization by the heroes of Reymont's satire: Borowiecki, Welt and Baum. Paradoxically, at this point I will risk a positive thesis about Łódź, in which I deeply believe: never in history has Łódź been such a friendly, well-run city as it is today. Yes, I know there is plenty of work to be done, but to think of Łódź in terms of a „new promised land” is simply the height of naiveté. Instead, look at Łódź as a city of enormous potential. A potential that other cities do not have, which needs to be recognized and creatively used. The architect of the City of Łódź, Prof. Marek Janiak, and his team aptly defined the roots and potential of Łódź in the „Strategy for the Spatial Development of Łódź 2020+” as a 19th century city, using the popularized but brilliant slogan that it is „the last undiscovered city.” What then is the essence of Łódź? Isn't the mix of functions of former factories, palaces and tenements, mentioned a few paragraphs above, the ideal fabric for a 21st century city, a city of reindustrialization with jobs close to home, with efficient multimodal transportation and green streets woven into a blue-green infrastructure? In my opinion, yes. Only it's not that simple, and I warn once again against overly simple solutions and operating false myths.
