The landscape resolution for Poznań, which was introduced laboriously, has turned a year old. It should therefore be almost fully operational. Unfortunately, the effects are meager, the resolution has lost its teeth - by the decisions of the governor, the Constitutional Court and the WSA. Legal and illegal ads erected before the resolution went into effect do not have to be changed. And the removal of ads erected illegally has been very tardy.
After five years of work, stoppages and the invalidation of the first version of the document by the governor, the landscape resolution for Poznań was approved by councilors last July. Unfortunately, its teeth were broken twice. First it was done by the governor, who ruled that the City Council could not formally divide advertisements into legal and illegal ones, and then by the Constitutional Court (and, in the wake of Poznan's WSA), which - paradoxically - ruled that the lack of such a distinction was incorrect. And that without appropriate compensation, changes in the form and location of media erected in a legal manner cannot be forced.
without a deadline, not a move
Thanks to the CT ruling, Jeronimo Martens Polska won against the City of Poznań in the Provincial Administrative Court. The owner of the well-known market chain refused, without compensation from the City, to adjust its legally erected carriers to the regulations. We wrote about this more extensively in the winter. The upshot: since there is no distinction between legal and illegal media, there are no penalties either for erecting and using any media erected in the wild before the resolution went into effect.
The Court's ruling also canceled the positive effect of the changes forced by the governor. After all, by adopting the resolution for the second time last July, the adjustment period for all four areas into which Poznań was divided was shortened to one year (the requirements, permissible formats, etc. are different for each). So much so that, de facto, the provisions of the resolution that mention the adjustment period ceased to operate in January . Hence, only advertisements that were created after last August must fit into the rules written in the resolution. Penalties can also be imposed for new media that do not comply with it. Such penalties have been imposed by the City...five - for a total amount of PLN 130 thousand (of which the City's coffers have so far received PLN 75 thousand).
Landscape resolution in Poznan - state after a year - Spring of Nations Square, some billboards were removed from here in 2023 (company name blurred by A&B)
photo: Jakub Głaz
illegal 90 percent
To summarize: both legal and illegal ads erected before the resolution went into effect can continue to stand in the same form. This assumes that there are about 150,000 advertising carriers in Poznań. Estimates say that 90 percent are self-building. Their removal - even from areas owned by the City - goes very reluctantly, as the entire procedure must go through the District Building Inspector.
Landscape resolution in Poznań - state after a year - first floor of a block of flats on Powstańców Wielkopolskich Street
Photo: Jakub Glaz
Tomasz Hejna, an active and substantive social activist fighting advertising chaos on his facebook profile Gemela Poznańska, reports that he has examined the legal status of more than 1,400 advertisements and the percentage of illegal media corresponds to estimates for the entire city. After a year of the resolution, he commented on the situation on his profile, not unreasonably accusing the City of insufficient synergy between city departments that have a real impact on the space:
The departments do not cooperate with each other and have too few people. The supervision of the mayor and his deputies is negligible, not to mention acting to the detriment of the public interest by failing to fulfill their duties. Anyway, you can see a mass of examples of this indolence on Gemela Poznan. And then there is the construction supervision, which can enforce the law, but the lengthiness of the proceedings is also a deal-breaker here. Many times it was (and still is) possible to take effective, albeit difficult and risky, action against the devastation of advertising space, using existing tools.
thirty in six months
So what have the city's services managed to check and eradicate over the past year? On the sub-page of the city's website dedicated to the landscape resolution, the last entry is from June, and relates to a conference on the legal probelms of landscape resolutions In turn, the gallery showing the removed billboards counts just over twenty sets of "before and after" photographs . All of them relate to last year's activities. This information was supplemented in Radio Poznań by Alicja Bogalecka-Pabisiak, head of the Landscape Resolution and Enforcement Branch from the City Hall's Urban Planning and Architecture Department:
Last year it was nearly 100 carriers, this year by the end of June it was about 30. At the same time, these carriers are disappearing for a variety of reasons, they are carriers that do not comply with the resolution, which are being dismantled, but they are also carriers that have run out of temporary building permits and have simply been enforced.
She also disagreed with the program's presenter that the resolution is working poorly. She considered as a big positive the very fact that residents and companies "want to talk" with the Authority on this issue. In fact, cognizant residents report questionable, in their opinion, advertisements using the SmartCity application . However, there is no publicly available document showing how quickly and how many of these reports have been considered and "dealt with."
Landscape resolution in Poznań - state after a year - Wiosny Ludów Square, some billboards were removed from here last year
photo: Jakub Głaz
sites too
It is worth adding here that the landscape resolution applies not only to billboards and other freestanding advertisements, but also to first floor service windows. The resolution allows a maximum of 30 percent of the surface of display windows to be covered, and that from inside the premises. Meanwhile, there is still no shortage of advertisements and graphics pasted on the outside and covering the entire storefront. Optionally, the text of the resolution allows the placement of a poster of - note! - A format, without indicating which size specifically is meant (only later the magistrate explained that it was A0 format). The provisions of the resolution are also probably not met by numerous signs.
Landscape resolution in Poznan - state after a year - arcades of buildings on Gwarna Street
Photo: Jakub Głaz
The city argues that only by fixing the Landscape Act on a national level will it be possible to fully combat the effects of the last two or even three decades of advertising free-americanism. By the way, it happened to cite the results of a recent NIK audit in July in such a way as to give the impression that they apply to the entire city. Meanwhile, the audit concerned randomly inspected advertisements of Poznan, Lodz, Wroclaw and Opole. Poznan's good result: 12 percent of illegal advertisements looks good, but it applies to only 34 (!) advertisements checked on land under the responsibility of the City Road Administration! Thecity also fails to mention thatinadequate supervision of advertising in the city was alleged last fall by, among others, the mayor of Poznań by inspectors of the Supreme Audit Office and notified the Public Prosecutor's Office in this case.
