January 16 of this year. The Council of the Capital City of Warsaw adopted a Landscape Resolution, the task of which - through legal solutions regulating the rules of placing advertisements in urban space - is to introduce aesthetic order in the city.
The Landscape Resolution, which covers the entire city, is a document regulating the appearance and location of advertisements, signs, landscaping objects and fences, which have so far often introduced chaos in public space.
what will change?
According to the resolution, the placement of large-format advertising nets obscuring windows will be possible only on scaffolding, during repair or construction work on a building's facade, for a maximum period of nine months. Minimum distances between different types of freestanding advertising media will also be introduced, and the largest ones (in 18 m² and 9 m² formats) will no longer be erected in the strict city center.
In turn, signboards, which are business cards for companies, should be legible, aesthetically pleasing, restrained and in harmony with their surroundings. Among other things, the document allows the use of signs, coffers, semaphores, openwork signs and murals, specifying their proper location.
The resolution also introduces standards for small architectural objects, such as trellises and tree guards, benches, bicycle racks, trash garbage cans and blocking posts. The document specifies material and color solutions to make city furniture stylistically consistent.
The Warsaw Landscape Resolution also establishes rules for the erection of fences within the city, their height depending on the degree of translucency, and suggests introducing restrictions on the fencing of residential neighborhoods. Moreover, fences adjacent to public spaces will not be allowed to be made of prefabricated concrete slabs, corrugated sheet metal, polycarbonate, sharp glass or ceramic elements.
penalties and adjustment periods
The resolution also proposes adjustment periods for existing structures - two years for advertising media, three years for signs, and five years for small architectural objects. What's more, violations of the rules on the siting of advertising carriers and signboards will be subject to a penalty fee depending on the size of the carrier (for example, the fee for an illegal advertisement of 100 sq m will be more than 1,023 zlotys per day).
For more information, see the guide to the resolution's provisions[here].
You can read more about the Polish advertising chaos in Anna Cymer's article in the series "Miasto na celowniku"[here].
