Case Studies

The point where Church Street spills into the roaring Roman Road of Edgware appears an exemplar of urban dysfunction and a crushing critique of London’s particular brand of anti-urbanism. Yet, this is a cityscape of infinite complexity, one of the most perfect ciphers for the contemporary city in which globalisation informs the street in every conceivable way.

Shop windows constitute the most visible layer of the urban signscape. Together with posters, advertisements and grafitti messages, they constantly update the city's visual environment: they discribe to the passer-by the current state of consumable objects. Created to animate the desire of shoppers, they are also talkative inventories of what a store has to comunicate. Crafted with humor or exhibitionism, some shop windows peel off from the store they represent and become self-referentional signs, mere decorations of the street.

The title European Capital of Culture raises a number of questions. Namely, how it is possible to avoid the “capital of culture” becoming a mere “projection surface”, where cultural roles and products are represented in extraordinary magnitude; to what extent the lifestyle of the residents is affected; how much room is given for the community – the population – that forms the structure and cohesive force of the city, to participate in the process; what democratic potentials are invoked by its presence and possible participation.

    “Are you a Varsovian? Bred-in-the-bone? Then show your ID!”, was one gentleman’s answer to the question what he thought about Mokotowska Street. In a perverse way his reaction expresses a pretty common attitude toward the street located in the city’s centre: Mokotowska has always been here and only those who know about it can claim to be True Varsovians.

Street trade creates a fluctuating and self-organising informal city space.  According to Richard Sennett, informal spaces at the grass-roots level make up the essence of a city.  “Informal public space requires under-determined urban planning, that is, an architecture which allows flexibility of use and admits physical gaps and indeterminate relationships between buildings.  It is in these liminal spaces that informality can flourish – the cafe built into a parking lot or the market stall outside a loading dock. 

Destroyed and rebuilt, intended and never finished, dreamt of and carried out, non-restored and non-existent, censored and true, improved and injured – Warsaw has always allowed a wide margin for dreamers. The city had to begin anew, several times. In the late 18th century, as Poland was being divided between Prussia, Austria and Russia, Warsaw lost its position as capital and its life-force evaporated; yet the industrial revolution revived it as an economic and cultural centre.

Community and community space are closely related – this is what we have come to conclude after brainstorming over the case of King Street at the Pécs workshop of Urban Ideas Bakery.

Over the course of the past decade the area of district VII known as Budapest’s old Jewish quarter has been a scene of fierce battles between developers supported by a largely corrupt district government and those civic organizations that have been assiduous in their attempt to protect the district’s 19^th century building stock a large part of which has already fallen victim to the wrecking ball.