Not every city is a metropolis

Rafał Matyja

28 of June '22

Wroclaw

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Article fromA&B 06 | 2022 issue

Metropolitanity is not a recipe for everything. In particular, it is not one for cities that, at various times in their history, grew beyond locality, but never became even semi-metropolises. At the end of the People's Republic of Poland, many of them were given the status of provincial centers. Today we do not have a name for them. There are more or less thirty of them.

More or less, because the criteria for belonging are fuzzy and it is always possible to add or subtract any of them. With a population of nearly 5 million, they make up a slightly smaller percentage of the country's population than the twelve member cities of the Union of Metropolises. However, they receive far less attention, and do not create institutional, transportation or urban planning solutions that are tailored to their size and character. They are incomplete metropolises, overgrown medium-sized cities.

The word "metropolis" has made quite a career in Poland. It is a symbol of a better life and a well-paid job. Metropolises are judged by their cultural and gastronomic offerings, as places that are quick to adopt innovations from the big world, cosmopolitan, craving what is modern. It's no wonder that styles of behavior in public space, urban policy solutions, even the verbal and symbolic setting of the urban world are built on this metropolitan standard - in Poland set by Warsaw, Wroclaw, Poznan, Krakow or the Tri-City.

Metropolises are also fashionable among experts and researchers. And while other fashions - such as the creative city or smart city - are passing rather quickly, metropolitanity seems more resistant to the passage of time. After all, the Union of Polish Metropolises was founded as early as 1990; a decade later, metropolitanity has become something of an urban ennoblement. What's more, almost every major city has sought the rationale for becoming a metropolis. And while skeptics would most readily restrict this right to Warsaw alone, the cards to the club dealt by the Union of Metropolises will be difficult to ever withdraw. While Krakow, Poznan and Wroclaw are reasonably comfortable with all this, and Lublin, Szczecin and Bydgoszcz can be awarded the title by promotion, it's hard not to have doubts about Rzeszow - the smallest of the Metropolitan Union's cities. Especially since cities with similar populations and functions - such as Kielce and Toruń - have been left out of the club.

Bielsko-Biala

photo.Silar, CC BY-SA 4.0

The status of small metropolises?

Metropolitanity has become a benchmark also because cities that qualify for the club are growing faster than those that lack this status (not to mention those that are not even provincial cities). It is in them that large global companies locate their branches, it is here that synergies between business and universities occur, and it is here that graduates of local universities are easily recruited. Cities ranked only slightly lower in population are deprived of all this.

Such a division fits perfectly into the simplistic logic of global capitalism, but is not good for the state and the public sector. It leads to increasing disparities in income, access to public services, and quality of life. Large metropolises - such as Warsaw, Krakow and Wroclaw - also have multibillion-dollar budgets that enable costly investments. At least that was the case in the pre-pandemic and pre-war eras. It's no wonder, then, that cities too small to be metropolises, but far too large to limit their functions to the role of a district center, see their opportunity in becoming more like the metropolitan model.

Katowice

fot.Marcel Wójcik, © Pixabay

To put it jokingly, the Union of Small Metropolises is lurking in the background. The ones that all Polish experts overlook, but recognize, for example, the OECD urban area classifications. There, not only Toruń and Kielce, Radom or Częstochowa, but also Bielsko-Biała, Tarnów and Nowy Sącz are promoted to the league of metropolitan areas. All because while we think of the size of cities by the number of people living within their administrative boundaries, the OECD methodology is blind to them: it sees population density, compactness of the area and links to the labor market.

Krakow

photo: Dariusz Staniszewski © Pixabay

But expanding the list of metropolises to include a dozen more cities is a road to nowhere. So is artificially pushing boundaries in order to make cities like Opole or Zielona Gora bigger. Such thinking about the city contradicts a certain tradition - derived systemically from city laws, and spatially from urban planning patterns of the pre-modern world, with medieval market squares, checkerboard street layouts, and the beauty of backstreets. Cities do not grow by expanding their borders, but by expanding their functions and spatial impact. The power of modern metropolises is encoded in other symbols, recognized by large perpetrators - such as capital and government - by such measures as the area of office space, transportation accessibility, the scale of the labor market and access to skilled labor.

on its own merit

On all these dimensions, cities aspiring to metropolitan status tend to perform poorly. Even those equipped with provincial center status. It's not worth it to be a "small metropolis," because metropolitanity, which is gradual in some matters, in others is more like a rare privilege, the lack of which is acute. Of course, distances in smaller cities are short, traffic jams are rare, the most important urban services are concentrated in an area that can be walked. This does little to mitigate the poor quality of urban public transportation. While in big cities the density and frequency of lines allow for efficient car-free travel, outside this first league the trouble begins. The frequency of most lines resembles PKS rather than urban transportation. Outside working hours and on weekends, it is better to give up this form of getting around the city or carefully check the schedule and plan your trip.

Krakow

fot.Wi Pa, © Pixabay

The poor quality of public transportation undermines the possibility of Park&Ride solutions. Many cities of this size are therefore rather concerned with increasing the surface area of parking lots in the center, seeing this as the only way to civilize the "automobility", which otherwise ends up occupying every free space by cars parked on sidewalks, lawns and blocking pedestrian crossings. This makes it not only the scale of resources that differentiates these cities from metropolises, but also the chosen direction of change, the hierarchy of public authorities' goals, and the nature of social pressure.

The latter, moreover, is clearly weakening with the decline in population. In centers that are not provincial capitals, there is usually no significant media, no urban activists capable of publicizing and blocking unfavorable projects of city authorities.
What, then, is left for large cities with a labor market of less than 100,000 people, where there are no large universities, no large companies occupying a million square meters of space? What kind of metropolitanity can they afford? Is a good coffee shop, some theater or concert hall enough? Is what they can enjoy just a remnant of the old world, which assumed the existence of life outside the metropolises?

eye candy

Large non-metropolitan cities should be the eyes of national urban policy. First of all, as access points to higher-level public services for those who live far from the metropolis. Secondly, as centers that can relieve the adverse phenomena of overcrowding, rising housing prices and the cost of living in metropolitan areas. It is also a question of the state's response to the climate crisis and the creation of a settlement network adapted to its realities.

Cracow

Climate-demographic calculation should argue against concentrating the entire population in a few large centers. This requires going beyond seeing the world through the prism of the administrative map that defines the government's optics. But the issue is more serious than changing the central government's mindset. What we need above all is an idea of a model of urban development other than "flawed metropolitanism." About arranging cities with a population between 80,000 and 250,000 in such a way that they have institutions and solutions tailor-made for them. Those administrative and those urban, ba - even communication and those related to institutions not subordinate to administration.
One starting point might be to think seriously about the country's academic and intellectual map. It starts with the question of what is the city-forming role of local universities. While it may make some sense to annually check the position of Warsaw University or Jagiellonian University, AGH University of Science and Technology or Warsaw University of Technology in the Shanghai ranking of universities, accounting for all higher education institutions according to the criteria in place there misses the point. Instead, it is worth asking whether it is possible for larger cities to function without academic or even scientific institutions of a different type. A city without students - and full-time students at that - develops quite differently. For while the academic achievements of the cadre are not visible on the streets, the lack of academic youth is a problem. A problem that translates into the demographic structure of the city, the shape of its elite, its cultural and intellectual life.

Lodz

In some cities, public intervention can also support research institutes, institutions of higher culture that serve a similar function, as well as somewhat dusty scientific societies. An intelligent state should seek new forms of strengthening centers that for the past quarter century have been denied the chance to manage on their own merits. If there is anything that is part of the advantage that the provincial city of Opole, with a population of 120,000, has today over the nonprovincial cities larger than it - it is the fact of having two universities: a university and a polytechnic, in addition to a suit of administrative institutions.

The often-raised demand for deglomeration - that is, shifting administrative institutions to smaller cities - will not have the same impact on their urbanity as academic, cultural or scientific institutions. The end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th decorated many small and medium-sized cities with buildings of the Falcon Gymnastic Society. This was a form marking not only new social aspirations, but also a framework for new social practices. Today, one can think of similar multifunctional city buildings, creating space for NGO activities, co-working, effective social dialogue and consultation. Perhaps the functioning of non-university research, educational and scientific institutions.

Warsaw - Poland's largest metropolis

Similarly, by the way, these cities need solutions to serve a sizable group of these daytime users who do not live in them, but often - sometimes daily - commute to them. Ideas for "medium-sized" public transport hubs, smaller than the shopping mall-expanded stations of Krakow, Warsaw or Katowice, but with something more than a cramped waiting room of a train or bus station. Especially since the 5 million residents of these cities are supplemented by another group of people for whom they are the city of first choice: as a place of schooling, study, contact with culture, or use of medical services, and not infrequently as a place of work.

Of course, the core of policies that strengthen such cities will always be treatments for their labor market. A blind alley, however, will be the proliferation of solutions like special economic zones. What these cities are losing before our eyes are strong local elites, institutions and connections that allow them to cope in difficult times. They still benefited from the development opportunity of massive European funding. But today they may be the first to fall victim to the crisis caused by a long period of pandemonium and war.

Wrocław

Creating an opportunity for this group of cities is not a matter for their local governments. Let's remember that these are centers with a small number of activists, weak local media, a marginalized intellectual elite, not translated into centers of power. Expert support from large academic centers often amounts to providing excuses for the policies of mayors and city hall, or condescendingly hinting at solutions typical of metropolises. It's worth reversing this and designing to suit these centers. And, above all, recreate a vision of the settlement system that restores their essential functions, as well as an urban robe that reinvents their urban framework.