Spatial Transitions: Urban Space in Postsocialist Poland

• In Event: Economy, Politics, and Aesthetics in Postsocialist Urban Transformation

Abstract

This paper examines the role of architecture in legitimizing new political and economic realities in post-socialist Poland. It maps spatial dimensions of transformation that can be observed in introducing new urban and architectural typologies and in using an aesthetic language very different from that of late modernism, which had been commonly identified with the socialist agenda in the Polish People’s Republic. This new image of Polish cities post-1989 cannot be described as a passive reflection or aesthetic equivalent of the changing economic reality; rather, we should see it as playing an active role in normalizing processes of aggressive privatization and high social costs that came with the rapid transition towards a market economy.

Author

• Lidia Klein, UNC at Charlotte