Poznan's Old Town looks much better than it did a few years ago. Thanks to the introduction of the Cultural Park, advertising and renovation free America has ended. Meanwhile, the entire city is waiting for the delayed landscape resolution. If its results repeat the success of the Old Town Park, order will once again come to Poznan.
© Poznan City Hall
For Poznan's mythical "ordnung" lost out in the 1990s to the elements of systemic transformation. Like the whole country, the city was swallowed up by visual chaos: gaudy advertisements, signs, shop windows or stalls. As early as the mid-1990s, the then-city visual artist Włodzimierz Figan wanted to solve the problem, proposing the creation of an "advertising code" to organize matters of advertisements and billboards. To no avail.
In 2000 Figan died, and the post of visual artist remained vacant for 14 years (!). It wasn't until 2014 that a position with similar responsibilities was taken by Piotr Libicki. Within the unclear limits of Polish law, he began to clean up the visually neglected city. A year later, the Sejm passed the so-called Landscape Law, which gave local governments more legal tools to clean up. Only not immediately, but after drafting an individually prepared local resolution.
Earlier, as early as 2003, a legal trick to help clean up the situation was the possibility of creating a Cultural Park for particularly valuable historic areas of the city. Although this solution worked well in Krakow, for example (since 2010), Poznań did not want to use it. Even Libicki was skeptical, as he hoped for a quick introduction of a landscape resolution for the entire city. However, the city's conservationist Joanna Bielawska-Pałczyńska was keen on the cultural park. She got what she wanted, and in 2018 the resolution for a park covering the area of the strict Old Town went into effect. The positive results are very visible today.
© Poznan City Hall
Seeing the effect, I have to revise my earlier approach. Waiting for the landscape resolution, we would not have been able to clean up the Old Town at such a fast pace," Libicki admits today.
There is no shortage of reasons for satisfaction. The Old Town is now almost free of excess signs, flashy colors and lettering. The preparation of the park proceeded in an almost model fashion. Work began in 2016, and by the following spring a working version of the document was ready. Presentations and workshops were held, students of the University of Arts designed a model site, and in the autumn, at the Arsenal City Gallery, in the middle of the Old Market, there were a couple of consultation meetings with residents, an outdoor exhibition and a research walk were arranged. All materials and information were given a consistent and highly communicative form. The Cultural Park also has an efficiently run and updated Facebook profile.
Several demands made during the consultation made their way into the resolution, including a ban on brightly lit storefronts or allowing signs painted directly on the facade. The refined document was adopted by councilors in March 2018 - two years after the work began. Property owners and tenants were given a year to make the changes. They were well taken care of - during individual meetings they were given a set of very clearly designed informational materials, as well as the support of graphic designers in creating new signs and display windows.
These activities were handled by two external companies we hired," says Joanna Bielawska-Palczynska, and cites the number of entrepreneurs and property owners with whom individual interviews were held: - There were as many as 739 of them, and all doors were knocked on. It is important that this was not instruction, but also help in preparing a new concept. Sometimes it was enough to convince them to take down a few excess signs.
© Poznan City Hall
Bielawska-Palczynska emphasizes that the meetings had a great educational value:
There has been an increase in awareness that this unique space needs to be taken care of together, she stresses, although - of course - it is not without its problems. - It is most difficult for pawnshops, funeral homes, kebab bars to fit in, but also, and this surprised us a bit, for chain stores. Arrangements and talks with individual entrepreneurs were easier," he says, adding that fines were handed out to the resistant ones. Cases were also taken to court. - For a year after the expiration of the vacatio legis, we had about 200 such cases.
Who handles the inspections and how effective are they?
Until the outbreak of the pandemic, they were carried out by a permanent team: our employee together with a city guard permanently assigned to this task," says Bielawska-Palczynska. - The city guards also had training on the provisions of the resolution and its enforcement.
It is worth mentioning that the document on the cultural park applies not only to signs and advertisements. It also regulates, among other things, the rules for setting up catering gardens, issues of replacing window woodwork, how to fix ventilation and air conditioning equipment on buildings. It also addresses the issue of painting facades, although it does not contain comprehensive guidelines for individual frontages or streets, as Poznań architects once advocated during a discussion.
We don't have this kind of template. We take an individual approach to each case, based, among other things, on stratigraphic studies," explains Bielawska-Palczynska.
Now, after a small area of the Old Town, the whole of Poznań is waiting to be cleaned up. Officials have only been working on a landscape resolution to achieve this since 2017, when councilors gave them the green light (more than a year after the national law was passed). The preparations, led by the Department of Urban Planning and Architecture, resembled work on the Cultural Park, with equally clear graphic materials by the Basterds studio. The creators of the provisions, however, closely watched the fate of resolutions in other cities - quickly adopted and just as quickly struck down by supervisory bodies. They learned from other people's mistakes, there was no question of haste, but the work, scheduled to end in 2019, slipped anyway.
© Poznan City Hall
The delay is influenced by the turmoil over the fencing provisions. Councilors pointed out to us some dangers of provisions treating fences or walls. The Poznań International Fair has also once again submitted its comments related to advertisements," says Piotr Libicki. He declares that a kind of compensation for the legislative slippage will be the high quality of the Poznań resolution: - Its advantage is a very clear structure. The city is divided into four zones. The requirements for each of them are completely described, without cumbersome cross-references. This approach is the result of an analysis of documents from other cities, which were sometimes characterized by illegibility and inconsistency in the formulation of definitions. With us, all concepts are very refined," he declares.
He adds that, even though the resolution has not yet been voted on, city units are still acting in the spirit of the resolution, using supporting materials that accompanied the creation of the document. In recent years, they have also managed to remove many illegal advertising media in the city, without waiting for a resolution.
So when will the finished document go before the City Council?
In October, the agreement and opinion of the revised resolution should begin, then the next stages of the procedure await us. I think February of next year is a realistic deadline," declares Piotr Sobczak, head of the Architecture and Urban Planning Department of Poznan City Hall.
