Chasing Warsaw

Socio-Material Dynamics of Urban Change since 1990

Monika Grubbauer, Joanna Kusiak

• Publisher: Campus Verlag
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9783593418476
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Der urbane Wandel seit 1990 macht Warschau zu einer der dynamischsten Metropolen Europas. Die AutorInnen nehmen Architektur und Städtebau, soziale Praktiken sowie lokale Wissensbestände und urbane Vorstellungswelten in den Blick. Die Analyse von Veränderungen und Kontinuitäten veranschaulicht die Neuordnung von Stadt und Stadtgesellschaft im Postsozialismus und Neoliberalismus. Warsaw is an accelerated city, one of the most dynamically developing cities in Europe. But Warsaw is also a junction of different modes of urbanism: European, Tzarist, modernist, socialist and - in the last two decades - aggressively neoliberal. The book analyzes the interplay of these urban forms under intense urban change after 1990. The interdisciplinary perspective allows the tracking of continuities and breaks, showing how social and material transformations are intertwined, how conflicts emerge and how Warsaw is at the heart of the changing geographies of centrality and marginality in contemporary Poland. The volume departs from typical narratives of the post-socialist city by showing and discussing how Warsaw's transformation can be read in the terms of global urban change.

Table of contents

• 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 Gądecki
• 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 – Wlodzimierz 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 Poblocki
• 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