Welcome to you after a long break. Today I will take you on a whirlwind of one short topic, but one after which your hands will drop to reach in turn for the knife, which in the natural logic of events should open in your pocket.
Let me start perhaps by saying that the range of perception, of what is happening in the space around us is shrinking every year. We see less and less and closer over time and this is due to the fact that our world has actually been accelerating steadily in recent decades. We used to be moved by impressive developments in other cities and today we are often surprised by a neighboring neighborhood in our city if we haven't been there for a year or two. What's worse, if we live in some pleasant neighborhood, we may inadvertently even approximate these misconceptions we have about our bubble we live in to the whole of this country and inadvertently, mistakenly conclude that all in all, this Poland is even as good as it gets.
Why am I writing about this. Well, because it is precisely our indifference that builds ideal conditions for the breeding of urban monstrosities and architectural Gargoyles in our country, and the farther away from media attention and public interest the more spectacular madness can be committed. Then, in turn, we are surprised that apartment buildings in the shape of medieval fortresses, cardboard skyscrapers or endless gut-busting urbanism spring up suddenly in the wildernesses and fields.
I'm about to tell a story about just one such locality, whose authorities seem to be very content with the fact that they and their actions are hidden deep inside the electronic information fog being beyond the attention of any major media. In such conditions, you can quietly and for years do whatever you want without the risk that someone will pay attention to it, and in the end, when we are stunned by the excellence of the effect achieved, it will be at most a tertiary news item lost among others, which during scrolling we will greet with a sad „Well, that's how it is in this Poland. Oh... Metallica is going to be at the National Stadium, it's a pity that the acoustics there are so lousy,” which will, of course, make us click the latter, and eventually some ad will pop up instead of the news anyway.
Inowłódz—St. Idzi Church
photo: materials submitted by residents
Today, however, an exclusive performance. Ladies and gentlemen, Inowłódz will appear before you on this intimate stage of urban drama. I won't hold it against anyone if this name has never crossed your ears, although it's possible that to some architects reading this it should ring a little bell in some church. After all, Inowłódz is a village in the Lodz Voivodeship with a population of a few hundred, which lives a quiet life unspoiled by too often spectacular events. On the one hand, these are conditions in which the quietly living residents often do not expect and do not expect anything more from the local authorities than that it will be as it was, and on the other hand, there is a growing temptation for local administrators to somehow break the economic and demographic stagnation, taking advantage of the national prosperity and writing themselves down in the history of the village as those who have distinguished themselves somehow for their locality. Then we reach for the tool of local plans to outline bold visions of development. This is how, among other things, we have planned for ourselves in this country in plans for housing areas for a sliver of an additional few tens of millions of Poles, making it necessary for the legislature to introduce limits on housing areas in a new law in order to stop these crazy and irrational urges of some local government officials. But this is just an aside digression.
Inowłódz—St. Idzi Church
photo: materials submitted by residents
The topic of Inowłódz is precisely about new development areas. I won't judge whether Inowłódz is a village that needs to develop dynamically, although looking at the stable slightly falling demographics and the fact that the village lies far from big cities or highways I can assume that such a future is not necessarily written for it. And there is nothing wrong with that. We don't need to turn every stubble field in this country into San Francisco. However, from the ambition point of view such reasons could be found, as Inowłódz is now a village, which is to become a town next year, and which in various past centuries used to be a town, and not just any town, because it has very old historical roots, as evidenced by the remains of the castle, but above all the Romanesque St. Idzi Church.
Inowłódz—St. Giles Church
photo: materials sent by residents
The surroundings of this very church and the series of miraculous events related to it are the subject of today's discussion. When it comes to finding land reserves for new bold masters in such localities, in very stagnant and solidified spatial structures, it often turns out that it is necessary to reach into really deeply hidden resources. And this is where the matter begins to get as interesting as it is unfortunately arousing slight horror and despair. For the Church of St. Giles, standing alone on a small hill above the village, has had such a reserve of land around it since time immemorial, in fact since the invasion of the Tartars, who, as the last urban planners, made certain bloody spatial modifications that constituted such a state for the next several hundred years. And so several hundred years passed and no one clung to this area, until suddenly one day someone said "Hey, why do we need such a large empty field near the village if we can build a billion single-family houses there, thus making happy a few private owners of this area, who happen to live in harmony with the authorities", and so it began.
Inowłódz—St. Idzi Church
photo: materials sent by residents
It's worth explaining here, devoting a few lines of text, why this is such a big deal? St. Giles Church is not just some one of the hundreds, if not thousands of medieval churches in this country that just stands there and cladding it with buildings is not even a „nothing of the sort”, which is actually an understandable issue. St. Idzi's Church is a Romanesque well-preserved and restored building from the 12th century, which easily finds its place in the list of the top 10 oldest masonry buildings in Poland attesting to the origins of the Polish State. It is so old that even from the point of view of the medieval warriors who roamed the fields of Grunwald it was already an ancient building to them. It was built before 95% of the country's cities were built, being one of the few masonry buildings of its time in the entire country, and for this reason it was given special care both before the war and in the post-war years, despite the fact that the regime of the time was not passionately fond of the church. Unfortunately, it seems that the new better times, unlike those justly past, treat such national treasures with much greater disinclination. If we at least knew how to create new spatial structures with respect for the historical landscape like the Germans or Scandinavians, for example, one could probably turn a blind eye to this. However, Inowłódz itself already bears witness to how it treats monuments. I myself realized after time that I had already had the unpleasant opportunity to describe on my profile another infamous case from this locality, which concerned the conversion of a historic synagogue into a grocery store and the trading of meat within the historic walls of this temple under the inscriptions of sacred texts on the walls. Somehow, however, no one is moved by this, so I dare to doubt whether the local authorities on their own would have the will and desire to protect something that for them is just a meadow and nothing more.
Inowłódz—St. Idzi Church
photo: materials sent by local residents
However, this empty field that surrounds the church, which with its uselessness caught the attention of the enterprising municipal authorities, is nothing more than an exposition foreground for a monument unique in the country, of importance and value far beyond the local scale. This is how this monument was protected for the past few decades, until the law changed to one that was more „Pro bizneso bono,” and in the early 21st century the entries of monuments in the registers had to be updated. Something that was previously protected in an inseparable way as a historic temple along with a display foreground, out of nowhere by a strange coincidence suddenly became two separate entries, separately for the temple and separately for the display foreground andnote, note, note, note, and by an even stranger coincidence the church was re-registered quickly and efficiently, and this second entry, which should have protected its surroundings lived to see approval in 2011 only to be deleted from the register by the then Minister of Culture after a quick objection from the owner.
Interestingly, all the institutions concerned seemed to be unaware of the minister's decision at the time, as the same year a new Study of Directions and Conditions for the municipality of Inowłódz was created, in which the ren area was protected as if that entry had been in force. Even stranger in this context is the entry procedure from the side of the Lodz Voivodeship Conservator of Monuments, who has not even neglected the matter, but probably still does not know that the entry was deleted by the minister, or even that he managed to make this entry earlier, since according to the information on theLWKZ website, the procedure for inscribing the surroundings of St. Idzi's Church has been going on uninterruptedly for 14 years now, slowly becoming a monument in its own right, so it can be assumed with a high degree of probability that it has fallen into some hole in the matrix and found its way into the eternal limbo for similar puzzles on the borderline of philosophy and bureaucracy.
Contents of the decision to register the surroundings of St. Idzi's Church challenged by the Minister of Culture in 2011
il.: public notice published on January 28, 2011 in the weekly newspaper "7 Days"
In this way, about the actual legal status of the land, in all likelihood, for years only the owner of the land himself knew, who had previously appealed the decision of the conservator and was patiently waiting forhis next opportunity, which happened in 2018 during the drafting of another study, in which the residents of Inowlodz were surprised by the change of use of the land around the church from wasteland to residential and commercial use. It is worth noting that already at the stage of drawing up this new Study, the residents were, as it were, deprived of the opportunity to take effective countermeasures in the participation process, because, after all, no one expected such a blow in view of the fact that the Minister's decision was cleverly kept silent. In addition, as I have already mentioned, misleading information on the subject was also presented by the provincial conservationist, so in the category of tinkering with local lawmaking this was a real blow below the belt. After the study, a resolution was immediately passed to draw up a new plan, and it was quiet until this year, when a meeting dedicated to landowners was brought to a meeting dedicated to landowners with a basically finished draft of the plan already wrapping the historic church tightly around with single-family housing with services, leaving basically only an ozyl of greenery in front of the church along with the existing cemetery there. Had it not been for the vigilance of nearby residents, whom they say the municipality failed to inform, they would not even have known about such a presentation of the draft plan, and everything would have merrily moved on toward disaster. To say that all this is a rape of the socialized urban planning process is like saying that there was a concert in Glastonbury.
Draft of the Local Development Plan for the vicinity of St. Idzi Church
il.: municipal information materials
This whole pyramid of events is really one big festival of miraculous phenomena, escaping logic and systemic action, but it's not over yet. And now please ladies and gentlemen at the very end a plot twist that no one expected. According to this festival's custom, the biggest star of the event took the stage last and gave it a go. While actually writing this text already, I found out that on the occasion that we are in the month of pre-election miracles, when once in a few years all the people's requests are heard, the Ministry of Culture got involved in the whole thing again and ordered that the process of registering the temple's display foreground be restarted and, in fact, that the initiation, which already existed only unrespected, be unearthed, which basicallybasically (I don't want to say hop and better knock on wood), but with the current climate prejudges the fate of the area for years to come, as the initiation itself should already be a form of protection in principle even more stringent than the registration, because it freezes absolutely all other processes starting with those of investment and ending with cricket playing and photosynthesis. The only slight concern is that, for all intents and purposes, it never expired after all, which apparently did not prevent the municipal authorities from conducting the planning process and even certain investments as if it did not exist.
Of course, respect for this intervention by the minister is absolutely due, but I have no doubt that in this case it was mainly the persistence and resourcefulness of the residents supported by the village head, who moved all possible strings that saved this historic landscape for the time being. Without them, moreover, I would not have had such an insightful knowledge of all these adventures, as well as all the other people of goodwill who helped them break through so successfully with their demands. Once again, it reminds me that the fight for good space is like the fight against terrorism. When British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at one time decided to crack down on the IRA organization she received a very fitting warning from them, which I will take the liberty to quote from memory. "You have to succeed every day and we only need to succeed once." And so it is with our space. We have to be vigilant and fight for it, fight every day, and a foolish investment only needs to happen once to nullify this effort. That's why it's so difficult and we suffer numerous defeats all the time in this country. Because this battle is uneven if you can't rely on the institutions that are supposed to support us in it.
il: Pawel Mrozek—author's collage
At the very end, however, two genre-heavy thoughts occur to me after all this.
The first is that such events, only more often without a happy ending, due to our holes in perception and ability to react always and to everything, happen very often in this country. I have no illusions that this is not some exception, that I just inadvertently hit the jackpot throwing a dart at a map and an affair spilled out. This country is like a big advent calendar, in which every field wins only it doesn't always go to such an organized population and we don't always have a pre-election period. And this in turn leads me to the second sad thought, that it all continues not to work. Behind the façade of a system laden with a pygmyard of regulations, especially when you get down to its smallest structures, this whole spatial policy continues to be a throw of the dice, shooting from the hip and hand-controlling the horse. We publish manuals for activists and residents on how to plant flowers and write projects for the civic budget, but in none of them is it written not to trust any administrative procedure or the fact that at any stage of anything by a moment of inattention you can be exposed to the wind. I repeat, such things are not the exception but the norm. Running the profile of One Hundred Years of Planning, I have encountered hundreds of such and similar cases that my readers turn to me with. This is a scourge that, thanks to the media fog, avoids our attention by getting lost in the white noise of information. This, unfortunately, will not be changed by regulations. The new law on urban planning will not stop such things. After all, this process has gone through all the stages from the preservationist to the almost finished local plan, after which only bulldozers and digging ditches for pipes would happen in the behind.
We are the ones who need to change. We have, as a nation, a further lousy sense of common value, compounded by years of communism, but in fact brought from an even older mentality. We don't value the common good and even less so when it's stuck in the froth, history or nature, because it can't be monetized for five zlotys and valued in Excel profits. What we need in this country is an ugliness tax style whip. That is, this tax exists and we pay heavily for it, but the cost is not calculated by anyone so the effects are unknown while responsibility is diffuse. If Kowalski saw in his tax return the cooperation between the ugliness created by the elected authorities and the way the taxpayer tightens the noose around his neck, I have no doubt that the country would quickly become more beautiful and its wealth would follow.
But until next time, when I'll once again throw a dart at the map and once again, to our amazement, we can weep.
Hey.
