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Distributed for Campus Verlag

Chasing Warsaw

Socio-Material Dynamics of Urban Change since 1990

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.


336 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 3/8 | © 2012

Interdisciplinary Urban Research

Culture Studies

History: Urban History


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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Chasing Warsaw
      Monika Grubbauer and Joanna Kusiak
Theses on Post-Socialist Urban Transformation
      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

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