Warsaw is one of the most dynamically developing cities in Europe, and its rich history has marked it as an epicenter of many modes of urbanism: Tzarist, modernist, socialist, and—in the past two decades—aggressively neoliberal. Focusing on Warsaw after 1990, this volume explores the interplay between Warsaw’s past urban identities and the intense urban change of the ’90s and ’00s. Chasing Warsaw departs from the typical narratives of post-socialist cities in Eastern Europe by contextualizing Warsaw’s unique transformation in terms of both global change and the shifting geographies of centrality and marginality in contemporary Poland.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Chasing Warsaw
Monika Grubbauer and Joanna Kusiak
Introduction: Chasing Warsaw
Monika Grubbauer and Joanna Kusiak
Theses on Post-Socialist Urban Transformation
Karl Schlögel
Karl Schlögel
I: Post-Socialism and the Dynamics of Urban Change
Toward a More Comprehensive Notion of Urban Change: Linking Post-Socialist Urbanism and Urban Theory
Monika Grubbauer
Comeback or Revolution of the Cities?
Regina Bittner
II: Urban Form and Representation
Continuity of Change vs. Change of Continuity: A Diagnosis and Evaluation of Warsaw’s Urban Transformation
Magdalena Staniszkis
Gating Warsaw: Enclosed Housing Estates and the Aesthetics of Luxury
Jacek Gadecki
The Liminal Cityscape: Post-Communist Warsaw as Collective Representation
Dominik Bartmański
III: Social Practices and the City
Sanitation and Disorder in Warsaw’s Urban Space: Cultural Determinants of Waste Management
Włodzimierz Karol Pessel
Visible and Invisible Ethnic Others in Warsaw: Spaces of Encounter and Places of Exclusion
Aneta Piekut
Kiosks with Vodka and Democracy: Civic Cafés between New Urban Movements and Old Social Divisions
Joanna Kusiak and Wojciech Kacperski
IV: Metropolitanism
The Laboratory of Polish Postmodernity: An Ethnographic Report from the Stadium-Bazaar
Roch Sulima
Space, Class and the Geography of Poland’s Champagne (Post-)Socialism
Kacper Pobłocki
The Cunning of Chaos and Its Orders: A Taxonomy of Urban Chaos in Post-Socialist Warsaw and Beyond
Joanna Kusiak
List of Figures
Contributors
Index