250 years that helps to understand today's Poland
Land - a concept close to architects and urban planners. In his new book, political scientist and columnist Rafal Matyja took it up - in a much broader sense, of course. "Urban Land. 250 Years of the Polish Game with Modernity" is a story told from the perspective of everyday life, civilizational changes and social transformations. A story about growing into the broadly understood urbanity that constitutes the civilizational ground underfoot. It makes it easier to understand the difficult Polish matter with which native designers struggle - on a par with other professional groups.
Stories of everyday life that eschew battle hustle and bustle, Machiavellian rulers and heroism make for fascinating reading that is as fascinating as it is - on the Vistula - underrated. Sometimes they are thrilling works, such as Paul Zumthor's tale of daily life for the Dutch in Rembrandt's time, written 60 years ago . The seventeenth century - the golden age of the Netherlands. Urban development, almost universal basic education, many freedoms and freedom of thought, taverns full of newspaper-reading(!) burghers. On top of this, there was considerable class flattening, and - much to the surprise of almost all nations - a strong empowerment of children. Finally, ubiquitous cleanliness and decent bourgeois architecture. In the 17th century, the Dutch were the most modern and - just! - the most bourgeois country in Europe. They had to fight and strive for their ground by concerted effort, so they lived quite stably and securely on a depression ripped out to sea.
holland and poland
Poles - on the contrary. Before the partitions abundant in territories, but arranged on them poorly, enough to be able to send grain to the Netherlands buying the products of Dutch manufactures for them. Modernity to the Republic begins tentatively knocking a century after the time in which Zumthor ends his story. Then the historical 250-year panorama begins with Matyja. A completely different world. The starting point seems to be far before the Dutch Golden Age. But the Polish land is about to fall into the hands of other administrators, under whose authority it will begin to strengthen itself as much as possible using inventions made or improved elsewhere: the stagecoach, railroad, post office, bank, factory, universal school and many other manifestations of modernity. They are mainly devoted to the first part of the book, which is entirely a fascinating story about Poland's entry into modernity and - as the title already announces - the game being played with it. All the more interesting because for almost the entire 19th century it took place not only in the three partitioned states, but also, as Matyja clearly emphasizes, in organisms of today underestimated importance: The Kingdom of Poland, the Grand Duchy of Posen or the Republic of Cracow.
The author warns, by the way, not to treat growing into urban soil as - as we are often in the habit of doing - a story of lagging behind or catching up. For it is not so much the time that is important here, but the result. The point we have reached: the object of our struggles today. But even so, while reading, it's hard not to feel the constant breathlessness that the inhabitants of the territory of past and present Poland have caught and continue to catch. The pursuit of the achievements of civilization and life on the model of nations with a well-established bourgeoisie, so different from the society that was pushed towards the cities in Poland successively by the abolition of serfdom, the Industrial Revolution and, to recall Andrzej Leder, the "overshadowed revolution" of the half-century after 1939. A society whose real, and not half-Cepelian or fairy-tale roots, have recently been exhaustively described by Kacper Poblocki in "Chamstwo" and Adam Leszczynski in "People's History of Poland."
a different perspective
photo:. Jakub Glaz
Matyja looks at the Polish transition, the transfer of population to urban land and the expansion of that land from non-obvious perspectives. Often through the prism of smaller cities like Bielsko-Biala, Nowy Sacz or Kalisz, analyzing both their shape and cultural distinctiveness. He looks closely at the coexistence of different nations, especially since it was not the "native" Poles who often played first fiddle in the growing urban organisms. Instead, he compares the urban and architectural fabric of 19th-century Warsaw not so much with the obvious Paris or Berlin, but with Budapest or even Bucharest, which took a leap upward and forward in the 19th century thanks to favorable geopolitical winds. We could only afford similar rebounds in the reborn Republic. Taking into account, of course, the numerical dominance and poverty of the Polish countryside, Matyja applies to the Second Republic, among other things, the measure of the drive for "metropolitanism" that was widespread around the world in the first decades of the 20th century, manifested both in the scale of rapidly expanding cities, the modern means of transportation that served them, or the modernist buildings and democratizing communal amenities.
Finally, the post-war era - a political leap, a social leap and, consequently, an urbanization leap. Growing into German cities in the west and the north of the country, but also new organizes built almost on raw roots. Matyja leans not only on innate new centers like Tychy or Nowa Huta, but - less significant and unsuccessful "bedroom towns" like Jastrzębie Zdrój. And the tug of war on urbanization during the communist era, the book shows not only through the construction of new neighborhoods and settlements, but also through the little-known example of Rzeszow, which - not having the conditions for it - had to somehow replace Lvov with the southeastern borderlands of the People's Republic.
photo:. Jakub Głaz
forecasts for the trash
There are also important micro-scale spatial-sociological observations, such as the one about the archetypal Ruch kiosks and their quite fresh disappearance from the country's landscape. Disappearance and shrinkage are also phenomena that affected the abolished provincial cities of the Gierek-era reform. In keeping with the peripheral optics adopted from the beginning, Matyja devotes attention to them in his description of the last thirty years, and believes that they deserve more, and that gravitating toward large growth centers is not the wisest behavior. However, he does not prophesy, he does not predict, mocking, by the way, the "serious" forecasts belonging to, as he puts it, "plotting historiography." He leaves the creation of the future to readers richer in knowledge gained from reading the 480-page volume.
"Urban Ground" comes out at a special time; for several years now, our game with modernity has consisted of curving space-time and returning to long-defunct orders or childish notions of them. The best evidence is the Minister of Education and the "whole backwards" incorporated Polish school, which could use not more pope and "patriotism" but, for example, the kind of history teaching that Matyja practices. Fortunately, the native urban soil today has a more compact structure than 250 years ago, and there is a chance that it will survive more than one. Taking this confidently into account, Matyja, while avoiding prophecy, calls for activating imagination and thinking about the future:
"An element of longevity is space (...). Imagination of this space is needed not only by those in power, but also by those who design great economic ventures, interesting intellectual breakthroughs. Also those who will settle in Poland as its future loyal citizens."
Who knows, maybe it will also be the Dutch displaced by the rising global ocean. Maybe they will strengthen the Polish urban ground with the experience of numerous bourgeois centuries and the confidence and calm that flow from them. These qualities we badly need, breathless in the pursuit of others and tired of forming urban ground.
