Tri-Cities. What are the New Bourgeois waiting for?
The New Bourgeois - a vision of the contemporary identity of the Tri-City resident
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The time is coming for a deeper reflection on what today is and, even more importantly, what tomorrow will be, this extraordinary Tri-City, 3 City, a culturally and historically fascinating Tri-Pack.
We already know that the Hanseatic majesty of Gdansk is balanced in it by the youthful dynamism of Gdynia. Of course, both poles go through their development processes differently, at their own paces and styles. The 1990s and the first decade of our century definitely belonged to Gdynia, feisty and knowing what it wanted. I remember the slogan "Open city for open people" - I liked it very much. At that time, Gdansk was quite laboriously awakening from its lethargy. At the beginning of free Poland, Danzig was a semi-darkhouse after dark, with the wind blowing in the cold, quiet and gloomy center. It was sad, it was impossible to have fun in this city, there was no nightlife. Therefore, the undersigned without hesitation abandoned that Gdansk in favor of Krakow, described in the March issue of A&B - a city of pubs and endless fun.
Well, but thirty years have passed. Today Gdansk is a completely different fairy tale. The vibrant nightlife of Elektryków Street, the retroversial Granary Island, the Waterfront on Szafarnia, the winter cappuccino in the heated Forum, live not die. The Shakespeare Theater (design: Design Group A.T.I., Renato Rizzi), the Baltic Philharmonic (reconstruction design: KD Kozikowski Design), the breathtakingly repainted Długi Targ, the European Solidarity Center, the World War II Museum... A vibrant, simply wonderful city has been created. As they say, there is no village. A walk through modern Gdansk that I like is a visit to Magda Beneda's Atelier spiced up with dinner at Basia Ritz. This is the way to live!
Shakespeare Theater - another architectural change in the space of Gdansk is a reminiscence of cultural splendor from the Hanseatic times, design: Design Group A.T.I. & Renato Rizzi
photo: Grzegorz Mehring
That modern Gdansk finally has the dynamics to match its past, it's time to make good use of unleashed potentials of its own and understood bipolar engine driven by collective energy. One can feel that Pomerania as a region has the initiative - the world viewed from the perspective of the Pomeranian Metropolitan Railway and the Airport looks good, integrated with the Tri-City, Kashubia and the rest of the voivodeship is today one of the best spaces in Europe, and thus in the world.
It's good to see Gdansk in this form, with a beautiful stadium (design: RKW Rhode Kellermann Wawrowsky) and Amber Expo (design: Enterprise-Projekt-Implementation Fort), a wonderfully operating port and a great Lotos refinery or marinas full of grazing yachts.
Every year at Krakow's Open Eyes Economy Summit, we wonder what secret lies in the perceived ease of the Krakow-Tricity relationship? I believe we are just now explaining it. These cities are still connected to Krakow and the rest of Poland by an elusive umbilical cord - common interests and connectors, which historically were the Vistula River and the railroad trunk line.
There is some kind of historical justice in the fact that Danzig turned into Danzig in the end - after all, this city was built with our money (ours, that is, Krakow-Poland's;)), so these are really the Recovered Lands after all, not only figuratively, but also as if in terms of development, commerce and business. This I write half-jokingly.
And quite seriously, I think that the fact that downtown Gdansk was 95 percent destroyed during the war, rebuilt almost from scratch with Polish hands and without outside help, has become the new founding myth of the city. Rebuilt by us, it naturally became more ours, better assimilated, as if ventilated.
A few years ago, while working with Eskadra on a communication strategy for a new and important public space for the city, which the Forum shopping center was to become for Gdansk, I had the opportunity to confront the question of the contemporary identity of the city's residents. From our research, it emerged that the most interesting audience is the so-called New Bourgeoisie. We took a closer look at them. And so, thread to thread, we arrived at Big Idea, which, in my opinion, perfectly captures the mood of this contemporary, updated Danzig identity. In our interpretation, Danzig's New Bourgeois turned out to be heirs to a peculiar cultural gene (see text on Bielsko-Biała, A&B 02/2022), transmitting the city's German-speaking past into a Polish-speaking present and future. This is how the idea of visualizing the idea of the new bourgeoisie came into being - inspired by Flemish painting and bourgeois culture of the 16th or 17th century, I consider the paintings to be some of the most beautiful advertisements that have been created in Poland in recent years, as confirmed by professional awards for these works. The attribute of the characteristic orifice and the artistic flair of the oil paintings perfectly conveyed what was at stake - capturing the essence of the contemporary identity of the people of Gdansk in a single image. And it is based on many pillars. The post-war reconstruction of the city is one. The second is the love of the sea, maritime traditions and motifs, the city's connection with ports and shipyards. The third is an interesting adaptation of Hanseatic traditions, involving identification with Gothic architecture, the city's golden age and merchant-trade legacy (to feel it, it's worth dropping by the St. Dominic's Fair, which, as every year, will be held here in the summer for the ... 762nd, yes - I'll spell it out - seven hundred and sixty-second time!).
The Wisloujście Fortress is charming thanks to the houses added to the defensive walls, which form something like Prague's Golden Street
photo: Grzegorz Mehring
The processes that shaped the residents of Gdansk over the decades, creating a distinct, cohesive community, were and are extremely interesting. They created a community that was unique - open-minded, and as President Pawel Adamowicz said, generous, as well as tolerant and modern. They have resulted in a specific Gdansk narrative, with respect to the present that guarantees a certain world of values (social solidarity, openness to other cultures, sensitivity), and with respect to the past that contains a phenomenal method for a kind of historical continuation of the city: Gdansk has never really been 100 percent German, just as it has never been completely non-Polish. This city has always been inhabited by a multicultural mix with a large dose of Polish-speaking population. This city, in its essence, was founded as a huge enterprise making a living by servicing Polish exports. Finally, and last but not least, for centuries Gdansk was tied to Krakow by the aforementioned umbilical cord of the Vistula River. Maybe today you can't see, hear or feel this, because the Vistula as a transportation system connecting the two cities is dead and has disappeared from the horizon of our imagination. But we do know how it was - thousands of ships a year traversed the Vistula on their way from Krakow to Gdansk and back. Hundreds of years of such dependencies had a huge impact on the formation of the identity of the two cities - and not only theirs, as Sandomierz, Zawichost, Kazimierz Dolny, Warsaw, Plock, Torun, Bydgoszcz, Grudziądz and Tczew still participated in this process along the way. Imagine that it's only been less than a hundred years since this communication channel has been out of service (since the opening of the coal railroad from Silesia to Gdynia, that is, only since about 1933). Before that, for more than seven hundred years, the Vistula was like a highway, full of schooners, dubas, whips, galars, rafts and smaller craft. It was a world populated by thousands of rafters and retmans, employing tens of thousands of people seasonally as crews, dock workers and burghers, pulling vessels returning from the Baltic against the river's current. Marked with embers, chests, packs and sacks traveled in an organized fashion between cities, creating a multilingual society of merchants, artisans and burghers - the ancestors of today's communities, most notably - the community of Gdansk. A city that accumulated the wealth of the entire Vistula basin - hence Danzig's budget at the time, which was many times larger than Krakow's.
The cranes and harbor atmosphere sculpt the character of the Tricity: without exploring from the water side it is impossible to feel the soul of the place
photo: Jerzy Pinkas
Let's be glad that Gdansk is no longer living in the past, that despite this closed, bygone history it has not become a second Venice, a city of memory, a stage set for tourists. As a Tricity, this agglomeration has - as they say - a sea of possibilities. I like to call it all the Kashubian Dragon. If this bipolar engine is properly utilized, this potential shared with the turbopolitan Gdynia and the intimate-elite Sopot in the middle, a super-heavyweight competitor will emerge, the third big Polish player in the arena of global development, right next to the emerging Lodz-Warsaw metropolis and the emerging Silesian-Cracow super-city.
However, in order for the Tri-City to play truly harmoniously and make full use of its potential, it is necessary to integrate Gdynia with Gdansk via Sopot even better, to integrate them multidimensionally, taking care of the balance. The advantage of Gdansk over Gdynia should not happen - there are many different ways to effectively keep both cities in balance. I think it's time to start managing more consciously the "Tri-City" brand that exists in practice after all. We have a fairly clear situation with regard to the "Gdynia", "Sopot" and "Gdansk" brands. We have fields where cooperation between them looks good - like the Tri-City airport.
But more needs to be done. After the Tri-City was successively co-created by history, eskaemka, agreements on metropolitan transportation and finally - in 2007 - the signing of the Tri-City Charter by the three Presidents and the Marshal of the Pomeranian Voivodeship, it is time for the next steps. It seems a good time to develop a thorough "Tri-City" brand strategy, perhaps to establish the position of "Tri-City Brand Mayor," a tangible institution to coordinate the cooperation of both the cities and the region, as well as numerous other Pomeranian institutions, such as the Pomerania Development Agency.
