The boring magistrate official is a thing of the past.
Today cities are ruled by miracle workers.
For years Polish cities have been moaning that their residents blow them to neighboring municipalities, there they forge shacks and pay taxes, and return to the abandoned motherland for work, shopping or entertainment.
Come back and pay - cries the abandoned metropolises, tempting with bonuses for the prodigals. For example, three big music festivals in the middle of the city, in the biggest park, on a hill, every few weeks in the summer. A great thing. You sit at home two kilometers away and hear everything for free - more than the suckers who bought a ticket, because you get sounds from not one, but several stages at once. You get more and more ambitious. With this mix, Warsaw Autumn is an amateur.
The urban phonics bonus also gives you the privilege of personalization. You adjust the sound yourself: loud enough that I pi...ę (open windows), loud as hell (windows closed) and just plain loud (basement, elevator). I was the beneficiary of these attractions this summer in Poznan, as a reward for settling on the outskirts of the Old Town.
The huge Citadel Park, a kilometer from the Old Market Square, hosted not only touring and two-day catharses like Men's Playing and Summer Sounds, but also an endemic Poznan novelty: the three-day Bittersweet festival. Yes, three-day, not three-day, because the silence lasted only from 2:30 a.m. until the first test of the apparatus. A quarter past eight in the morning.
Festivals - a great thing, but people don't get along. They whine all over the country. That it makes noise, vibrates and rumbles. That sleep, leisure, seniors, children, dogs and atypical people. Finally, that where the events took place in public parks - the wildlife probably got a head start (as if squirrels could get even dumber!). Protests in Katowice, petitions in Poznan, whining in Krakow. In the latter, the court fortunately repealed in August an anti-noise resolution targeting, among other things, noisy pubs and parties. It didn't repeal anything in Poznan, but a resolution similar to the one in Cracow doesn't prevent people from arranging phonic attractions (try plugging the big speakers with a few pieces of paper printed with the resolution). Only Rzeszow made a fool out of itself, as it asked for the opinion of the people and took into account their groans and announced the end of mass events in the city center. By doing so, it has written itself out of the prestigious League of Fantastic Festivals, which make(nomen omen) noise about the city, swell hotels and the wallets of restaurateurs and monkey store owners.
The latter have been under incomprehensible fire lately, but Warsaw's City Hall, for example, did everything in September not to impose a night-time ban, which supposedly reduces the number of street brawls and fights and interventions at the ED. You can see the concern here for those who have returned to the city from the periphery and have noticed the gap between the price and quality of their new accommodation. Nothing to do but drink all the way, especially since this is not an accident, but a deliberate policy. The head of Poznan's Department of Architecture and Urban Planning said more than a year ago at Szczecin's Westival that the city can't screw the conditions for developers who build in the center - out of concern for the affordability of a square meter. So it could be a little better, but still more expensive, and that would end not so much in a drinking binge as in a street brawl.
And yet cities are also tempted to return by an increase in the level of security. That level is measured, as you know, by the number of surveillance cameras, which goes into the thousands, but even that is not enough. The cameras are so busy doing security that they still barely note the other attractions with which the city is tempted to return: loud and fast rallies of magnificent furs and motorcycles. These grassroots games complement the festival's offerings with their high decibel count. They are also, as they are, an exquisite free show. Fortunately, thanks to too few cameras, no one particularly fights them, although they could - under the unlivable speed and noise regulations. The speeding carts, by the way, provide a beautiful counterpoint to the static, recently spruced up streets with traffic calming, trees and other contrivances from Jan Gehl. At no thriller or horror movie did I experience as much excitement as at a restaurant garden on a semi-detached street in a residential zone, next to which a rally car flew past with a roar. A few days later, a similar car slammed into a nearby lamppost.
Allowing such attractions also helps combat the shopping malls that cities once made it easy to suck the life out of the centers. Indeed, there's no room yet in malls for races and multi-thousand-dollar yuppies, although who knows what will happen. Malls, once sterile and with claims to prestige are slipping into mere urbanity. Toilets not as clean as they used to be, post offices, service points and official windows have sprouted up next to stores. There will be a drunkard and a beggar. In the middle of alleys barbers cut hair in public, almost like street barbers in Vietnam. Then there are the young. Teenagers prowl in flocks no longer on housing estates, but in malls. Some, not as they once were, neutrally, according to gallery etiquette, but as idealistic guardians of morality. There has been loud talk of guys in reflective vests with "shon patrol" written on them, stigmatizing girls who are dressed in shorts. Poland's version of the Taliban. No wonder Ziemowit Szczerek wrote somewhere recently that he likes to hang out in galleries, those modern bazaars, medinas or sukkahs. Just look at how they will someday swell with urban chaos, turn into a multifunctional district and begin to tempt tourists with what the palimpsest of Diocletian's palace attracts in Split.
So let's appreciate that city authorities today want to successfully combine everything and for everyone in the centers: living in densified buildings and fireworks for tourists, tolerance for raiders and loud yuppies with facilities for seniors. That they glue together the Las Vegas of postmodernism with the modernists' wet dreams of momentum and the roaring machine. By combining fire and water, they are performing miracles, and it's time to
hire them for other equally feasible tasks. I'm waiting for some president's tour to show the public how to slam a revolving door or lick their own elbow.
Jakub Głaz
more: A&B 11/2025 - Krakow from scratch,
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