April marks seven years since the Parliament passed the so-called Landscape Law. The legislation went into effect in September 2015. However, the effects have been poor. It has succeeded in some cities or municipalities, while in others the procedures drag on or have not gotten off the ground. All because of the voluntariness of enacting local documents. A landscape resolution should therefore be mandatory.
Last week, once again - contrary to announcements - the landscape resolution did not come to the session of the Poznan City Council, although announcements have been heard for several years proclaiming that the document is almost ready. Work on it has been going on since 2017, and the deadlines for enacting provisions important for the aesthetics and space of the city have been postponed at least several times. Suffice it to mention that they were supposed to be ready as early as 2019. At the time, the mayor's plenipotentiary for aesthetics Piotr Libicki (the city's visual artist) promised that the delay would allow the document to be refined very precisely. However, there was no question of as much as a three-year slip.
Meanwhile, for more than two years the matter of the resolution has been handled no longer by a team associated with the city visual artist, but by the Urban Planning and Architecture Department of the City Hall. One gets the impression that during this period the procedure slowed down, almost f roze (we wrote more about the Poznań resolution and its provisions here). Finally, the resolution was to be voted on the first Tuesday of April, but - unexpectedly - the mayor himself took it off the agenda. Apparently, the provisions of the resolution need to be re-drafted so that they do not raise legal doubts.
enough of these excuses
These are already more translations. It is difficult to assess their validity and actually it is a waste of time to do so. There have already been so many years to prepare the document, and along the way - in other cities - formal pitfalls have been revealed and often defused, that another withdrawal of the resolution is not justifiable. Of course, if you assume that its preparation is handled by a competent team of people.
Be that as it may, the case of Poznań, the snailily proceeding resolutions in Wrocław or Katowice, and Warsaw, which is struggling with formal adversities (invalidation of the document by the provincial governor, an unfavorable ruling for the city by the Supreme Administrative Court and the need for renewed arrangements and submission for public review) show how ineffective the provisions of the 2015 law are. First, it does not mandate municipalities to prepare resolutions, and second, it does not set maximum deadlines for the procedure. Voluntarism and dragging out actions will never allow Poland to free itself from advertising and aesthetic chaos.
Who benefits - good question!
The winners are cities where the resolution is already in force, such as Gdansk or Krakow. Others cede the field to managers of advertising media and continue to allow them to make big money at the expense of the quality of public space. As expected, the approach taken in 2017 by Olgierd Dziekoński, co-author of the law architect and urban planner and former secretary of state in the Chancellery of President Bronisław Komorowski, was quite naive:
We wanted to bring about a kind of competition between cities and municipalities, so that the leaders in implementing changes would then be followed voluntarily.
Meanwhile, last week there was another attempt to cast doubt on the constitutionality of landscape resolutions. In its local government service, the Polish Press Agency posed the questions:
Do specific landscape resolutions of municipalities violate designated constitutional principles, including the principle of competitiveness, and are zoning regulations on landscape resolutions constitutional - among other questions, participants in the conference "Landscape Resolution - Constitutional Issues," organized by the De Republica Institute, tried to answer.
After a few longer paragraphs describing the conference, PAP reports that the speakers found that the
the impossibility of balancing private and public interests in an individual case, as well as the risk of amending the resolution at any time and the impossibility of claiming compensation for lost rights, justify the charge that the regulations introduced are incompatible with the values on which the rule of law is based.
It is therefore high time for parliamentarians to get down to the business of amending the regulations responsible for landscape resolutions, so that these documents are mandatory and their embedding in Polish law raises as few doubts as possible. In the face of pandemic problems, economic problems and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, matters of advertising chaos may seem less important. Yes, it is not a problem of the utmost importance, but we must not put it off ad acta. On the contrary - in times of turmoil and uncertainty, any orderly slice of the reality around us is useful.
