Interview from A&B issue 05|2023
The latest publication on urban culture posits that car ownership in Poland is not a habit, but an addiction. In a conversation with Marta Żakowska, author of „Autoholism. How to put your car down in a Polish city” we discuss how movement is a primal feature of a satisfying life, and how uncontrolled Polish car savoir-vivre is depleting the cultural capital of future generations.
Marta Żakowska — Anthropologist and urban researcher, coordinator of the Warsaw Museum's City Laboratory. Author of research and texts on sustainable spaces and urban exclusion, as well as the book published by Krytyka Polityczna Publishing House, „Autoholism. How to put down the car in the Polish city”. She conducts seminars at the Institute for Public Space Research at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and at the School of Ideas SWPS. Co-founder and editor-in-chief of „Magazyn Miasta”, initiator of the SAS School of Community Architecture and a 2014 scholarship holder of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage. Representative of Poland in the European City Makers group participating in the process of creating the new European Urban Agenda.
interview with Marta Żakowska
Ania Diduch:Whatdidyou take from reading Jane Jacobs' „The Death and Life of America's Great Cities,” and how did you revise your observations years later when reading the Polish translation? What lessons do you draw for Polish reality from a book that was written so many years ago?
Marta Żakowska:I first encountered the book at the beginning of my studies — I found the original edition while snooping in my older brother's room. It was the mid-2000s, and while I probably understood little at the time due to the language barrier, reading it awakened in me an interest in urban space. Having grown up in a large Polish city in the 1990s and 2000s, I saw how the car culture, which was developing intensely at the time, gradually became the most important factor in the transformation of my city, swayed by young capitalism. Thanks to Jacobs, I came to understand that a reality other than the automobile was possible — that the culture of automobile dominance was not self-evident, and that its costs were realistically destroying our social life and well-being. In Poland, which had just experienced the long-awaited automobile tsunami that many of us had been anticipating as we entered the European Union, this perspective was simply absent. At the time, our space began to be flooded by waves of used cars from old Europe, and we treated this as a success representing our freedom and modernity. Jacobs allowed me to suspect that something was wrong in this process.
When the first Polish translation of this famous book was published, I was already part of the Congress of Urban Movements. Three years earlier I had co-founded „City Magazine,” so I had already been editing it for some time and promoting ideas close to me. I knew that the costs of mass motorization in Poland, not just in my city, were gigantic and disastrous. And that the taste of a different way of developing space and urban mobility, which Jacobs had given me a few years earlier, was of great importance in our reality, because it had been essentially absent until then. It was known to a small community at the time. It seemed to me at the time that it would be enough to spread this knowledge so that we could begin to develop cities and their spaces, which largely determine our lifestyles, in a healthier, less car-oriented direction. As time has shown, I was wrong. The determinants of Polish autoholism are strong and complex.
Ania: How did your experience running „City Magazine” pay off when working on "Autoholism"?
Marta: More than a decade of work at „City Magazine” gave me the opportunity to think deeply about various urban phenomena, many trips abroad and contact with foreign experts, activists, architects and civil servants. Since from the beginning of my career in urban issues I was most attracted to transforming car culture and building a cultural foundation for the development of healthier cities in this context, I regularly met people abroad, through whom I became convinced that consistent work on change in this area brings good results. At the same time, I worked in the environment of Polish cities — with the community and community workers, local government and civil servants, architecture and developers, academia. Year after year, my conviction that the hard work — mine and that of various circles — for education in this area would bear fruit and succeed in quickly reducing the excessive number of cars and the culture of mobility conducive to its growth weakened. A few years ago, we finally reached a point where the knowledge of the harmfulness of the excessive presence of cars and car infrastructure, the excessive scale of the development of car culture, is simply obvious. And available. Solutions are also already known in Polish cities that can help untangle this Gordian knot. The world's most prominent experts in this field have already been with us, specialists with a track record of exceptional and difficult transformations of mobility culture in various cities around the world. They advised local government officials, investors. Countless decision-makers in our cities have been to countless cities around the world that show in practice why overdevelopment of infrastructure and car culture has murderous consequences and how to change this direction. Yet no fundamental change is taking place. We have more and more cars every year, and we continue to invest in their infrastructure disproportionately to other modes of travel. So I began to suspect over time that our car crisis has irrational sources. And snooping through the registers that led me to our civilizational and cultural autoholism.
Photos by Jakub Szafranski from Marta Żakowska's book "Autoholism. „Autoholism. How to put down the car in the Polish city”,
- made available courtesy of Krytyka Polityczna Publishing House
photo: Jakub Szafrański
Ania: How has your understanding of the issue of autoholism evolved since you started working on the book? Did the original thesis change by the end of writing?
Marta: Yes. In the very early stages of summarizing my experience working in the area of our car crisis, just before writing „Autoholism,” I was closer to the reality of habits. I thought that the transportation and political choices betting on the car as the most obvious tool for getting around were a matter of habits, individual and social, encapsulated by the Polish delight in freedom after the fall of communism and entry into the European Union. Habits further conquered by external conditions — poor public transportation systems, bicycle infrastructure, lack of alternatives. But after all, habit is not part of the whole system of values, emotions and psychological mechanisms, systems of denial that sustain the Polish relationship with cars. It is not the key to understanding the overdevelopment of automobile traffic and the conditioned nature of everyday life in Polish cities, and the incessant automobile decisions of the authorities despite their enormous negative social, health, economic and climate effects. This thing is more than a habit. Only the mechanism of addiction — autoholism and its systems of denial — can be responsible for such a gap between the cost-consciousness of car culture and the need to transform it and our practice.
Ania: The car is a symbol of power. Does the change to reclaim the streets in cities begin with a reevaluation of roles in family, work, economics, politics? What micro changes can you make on your own in your immediate environment?
Marta: Changes in our attitudes, upbringing, values and habits. At the individual level, because it is from here, among other things, that the cultural level and the sequence of events that follow, including political and budgetary decisions that support the development of an excessive presence of cars in our lives or limit it. Ewa Woydyłło-Osiatyńska, a prominent addiction therapist whom I interviewed while writing the book, believes that the addiction system is like a perch. It pulls us in gradually through various supporting processes. We need to transform the structure of this perch at every level, starting at the level of raising children and showing them what is and isn't obvious in the city and the values associated with the ways we move. For their health, for us, and for the sake of the planet. We can also drive only where necessary. And only those of us who have to, because for various reasons they have no alternative. We can lobby for solutions that facilitate pedestrian movement, the operation of efficient public transportation, cycling and other forms of micromobility, the development of multifunctional residential neighborhoods, cool localism. My book is full of examples of such actions — at the level of private life, at the level of society, at the level of political, architectural and investor decisions.
Photos by Jakub Szafranski from Marta Żakowska's book entitled. „Autoholism. How to put down the car in the Polish city”,
- provided courtesy of Krytyka Polityczna Publishing House
Photo credit: Jakub Szafrański
Ania:Let's talk about the hidden costs — besides the social ones — of autoholism. I'm thinking of car production as such, including electric cars. What is the ultimate goal of combating addiction — reducing gas emissions, moving to a circular economy, access to spaces that shape new social ties?
Marta: The market, infrastructure and culture that make up the automobile reality are all coupled parts of a complex system. The costs and benefits you ask about are therefore broad. By reducing the presence of cars in our lives, we will reduce carbon emissions and pollution. Transportation is responsible for one-third of emissions in the European Union, largely as a result of highly developed automobile traffic. These statistics, however, do not include emissions from the production and transportation of vehicles and their components, nor from the production and transportation of materials needed for motorized transportation infrastructure, its construction. In doing so, automobiles pollute the air, and not just the combustion ones. This can be clearly seen in air quality analyses of congested streets. They also pollute other elements of the environment. In addition, the carbon and environmental footprint of electric car battery production leaves much to be desired. That's why, for example, the mining of cobalt, lithium and nickel raises objections from communities living in the areas where these processes take place.
Less demand for automobile infrastructure (freeing up tracts of parking lots and streets; streets occupy 20-30 percent of the world's cities and 50-90 percent of their public spaces!) activates the potential of land for other uses. It opens a new way for the development of cities, neighborhoods, settlements — it allows investment in greenery, recreation areas, densification. Fewer concreted streets and parking lots also mean more potentially biodiverse and permeable space, which does not contribute to the environmental crisis and increasing urban temperatures, and therefore increasing drought levels or mortality during the increasingly frequent hot periods. Finally, it's more land for movement and for people to be together more often in public spaces — so needed today. In the book, I describe these contexts and related solutions in great detail. I cite urban and architectural policies that address the epidemic of diseases associated with sedentary, including car-based urban lifestyles and the epidemic of loneliness. We need these solutions — for climatic, social, psychological and health reasons.
Photo from Marta Żakowska's book titled. „Autoholism. How to put down the car in the Polish city” — shared courtesy of Krytyka Polityczna Publishing House
photo: Jakub Szafrański
Ania: Addiction is a kind of foreign body that occupies mental space. What happens when autoholism disappears? What new sensations will the space in our heads be unlocked for?
Marta: First and foremost, I hope for movement and its benefits. Living in a world where we move by car almost from bed to office is not conducive to well-being and health, as study after study shows, with WHO diagnoses and appeals to the fore. We also need each other. After all, passing each other, if only on the way to the bus stop to get on a fast and reliable, non-congested public transport, makes it easier for us to look each other in the eye. We also know from research that pedestrian traffic and the favorable infrastructure of cities influence the development of local social life. That's why Tina Saaby, the legendary former chief architect of Copenhagen, introduced an architectural policy of eye contact in Copenhagen. Carlos Moreno, creator of the fifteen-minute city [cf. A&B 04/2023], on the other hand, recently proclaimed the proximity revolution. The tradition of urban design geared to excessive automobile traffic is a pernicious relic. We need a healthier alternative to it in order to open up to a better and safer life. And to rework our cultural and civilizational addiction to cars — autoholism.
Ania: Thank you for the interview.
Photos by Jakub Szafranski from Marta Żakowska's book „Autoholism. "Autoholism. How to wean a car in a Polish city” — provided courtesy of Krytyka Polityczna Publishing House;
The book was also under the media patronage of A&B Publishing House
photo: Jakub Szafrański
