Abstract
The city of Łódź in central Poland has witnessed de-industrialisation and urban decay. Often tagged the Polish Manchester on account of its former prominence in textiles, the city has struggled to reinvigorate itself in the post-socialist period. Focusing on the post-1999 period, this paper examines how narratives of “Europeanisation” and “multiculturalism” have been promoted to legitimate current efforts to regenerate the city. It is argued that new moral geographies are being constructed, in part, through a selective reading and exploitation of the city’s past as well as through wider socio-economic processes, which have a detrimental impact on sections of the city’s population. The final part of the paper highlights how the dissonant heritage of the city offers possibilities for more inclusive “revitalisation.”
Recent work on post-socialist places has highlighted the ways in which cities in East-Central Europe have pursued paths of “Europeanisation” that have emphasised links with Western Europe in an attempt to distance their association with an allegedly more primitive East, and has at the same time acknowledged the existence of external countervailing processes which position such places as “Eastern other.” 1 Attention has been drawn to the ways in which adherence to neo-liberal policy prescriptions (privatisation, Foreign Direct Investment, marketisation (de(re)-regulation)) has been a source of important symbolic capital (i.e., evidence of “Europeanisation”), which can leverage further economic investment. Writers such as Coles, Young and Kaczmarek, and to a lesser extent Michlic also draw attention to the ways in which reference to some pre-socialist “Golden Age” has worked to marginalise and discredit the socialist period. 2 Murzyn’s work on the Kazimierz district of Kraków, for instance, has highlighted the importance of the area’s pre-socialist multicultural history to its post-socialist regeneration, as well as the role currently being played by “Europeanisation.” 3
Scholars have also shed light on the post-socialist urban condition through an exploration of marginalised and neglected urban histories 4 and recognised the complexity and contested nature of these histories and the subsequent politics of representation. 5 This article seeks to show how the discourses of “Europeanisation” and multiculturalism have been deployed in order to legitimate specific efforts to regenerate the city of Łódź. In particular, the article examines how the dominant “Europeanisation” narrative can foster the commodification of those difficult pasts (e.g., Communist heritage tours, roots-based tourism). It also highlights the ways in which such commodification packages history and remakes it in line with the contemporary concerns of particular groups, and in accordance with the imperatives of accumulation.
“Europeanisation” in this paper is conceived as a complex positive signifier under which neo-liberal policy prescriptions and practices have been advanced (with local inflections), contested agendas subsumed, opponents marginalized, and urban space transformed. Two aspects of “Europeanisation” in Łódź warrant emphasis: first, the way in which urban discourse in the city refers to, and is legitimated by, reference to “Europe,” “European practice,” and so on; and second, the role played by the European Union, and its important function in funding “revitalisation” schemes, framing administrative and managerial practices, and encouraging particular programmes. These two aspects relate to and mutually reinforce each other, and underpin the contemporary potency of the wider “Europeanisation” discourse. In this article I refer to both these aspects.
The city of Łódź in central Poland has attracted considerable interest from scholars analysing the post-socialist urban condition, 6 urban environmentalism, 7 and urban regeneration. 8 Yet despite this attention, the manner in which the specific strategies being pursued by the city council and other interested governmental and non-governmental parties to “revitalise” the city relate to hegemonic discourses framing post-socialist transformations have only been briefly and tangentially discussed. 9 Furthermore, there has been a general neglect of how the city’s “revitalisation” strategies intersect with contemporary (popular) discourses about particular segments of society and places within the city and, perhaps most importantly, how visions of the possible are being discursively constructed. A partial exception is David Smith’s work on the changing moral geographies in Łódź throughout the pre-socialist, socialist and post-socialist periods, which emphasises how the different dominant social relations “legitimated” certain practices. 10 Moral geography here refers to how moral codes are inscribed into the cityscape, hierarchically ordering places and people according to hegemonic norms.
Smith, referring to contemporary heritage tourism in the city, indicates that the former textile factories of Scheibler and Poznański could become symbols “extolling the long-lost virtues of paternal capitalism [and notes that they are] in death as in life, moral mills” 11 (my italics). Smith concludes that “it is such surviving physical structures as these which can so selectively represent past moral geographies. The human struggles, and the suffering, are nowhere to be seen.” 12 Such physical structures in-themselves are meaningless, and as such different social groups attempt to attribute meaning to them as heritage. In doing so, the current conjuncture and its moral order are shaped and remade, with benefits and costs unequally allocated to different social groups. As Low, Taplin, and Scheld note, “heritage . . . often only reflects the dominant culture,” 13 but physical structures including former factories and palaces offer a range of interpretations and meanings, thereby giving rise to what Ashworth and Tunbridge term “dissonant heritage,” 14 that is, discord in how the past is represented. The recognition that meaning is ascribed to, rather than inherent in, places denoted as heritage objects facilitates discussion of how hegemonic discourses of “Europeanisation” work to obscure unwelcome histories and interpretations of the past, as well as positing the possibility of greater inclusivity. As Czaplicka, Gelazis, and Ruble note, “how the history of a city is being constructed reveal[s] a great deal about the aspirations of its people—or of its cultural and political elite” 15 (my italics). This article therefore, in addition to exploring the relationship between “Europeanisation” and the “revitalisation” agenda, also seeks to draw attention to how new moral geographies are being shaped within the regeneration process as a constitutive part of post-socialism.
Reframing the Past and the Present
Łódź grew on the success of the textile industry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and until the Second World War had an ethnically diverse population that included Germans, Russians, Jews, and Poles. According to the 1931 census, the city had a population of 604,470; 52.2 per cent were classified (according to language used) as Poles, 33.5 per cent Jews, and 14.3 per cent Germans. During the war, most of the Jewish population, after enduring years of slave labour in the Nazi-created ghetto, were murdered at Chełmno or Auschwitz. 16 By 1945, the population was more or less nationally homogeneous, with a Jewish population of only twenty thousand (approximately), and very few Germans, most of whom had fled prior to the arrival of the Soviet Army in January 1945. 17 The incoming communist authorities, as Michlic notes, “succeeded in removing the multiethnic and multicultural heritage from the official histories and excluding it from public memory,” 18 though it should be recognised that such “Socialist Patriotism” was part of a wider programme of securing a modicum of legitimacy from the population. 19
Not only was the multi-ethnic past marginalised (though it lived on in popular [negative] stereotypes and perceptions, and was strategically exploited by the ruling Polish United Workers’ Party [PZPR]), 20 but Marxist interpretations of the city’s past highlighted the bourgeoisie’s exploitation of the working class as well as the workers’ heroic attempts to improve their conditions through actions such as withdrawing their labour from employers as in 1892 and 1905. 21 In short,
The communists viewed the urban industrial bourgeois and their culture as antithetical to the working classes whom they championed; the multiethnic and multicultural past had no place in the communist version of the city’s history and would be largely forgotten.
22
Given that this multicultural history remained inscribed within the cityscape (the built environment of Łódź remained largely intact after the Second World War, with the exception of many Jewish buildings, including synagogues destroyed by the Nazis), the process of forgetting was, arguably, somewhat more difficult than in those places that had been more damaged, such as Warsaw. The land-use patterns laid down by pre-war capitalism remained, as did pre-war stereotypes of cultural difference. The strikes in the textile mills of Łódź in the summer of 1945 had both a political and an anti-Semitic character. 23 Subsequent labour strikes in the mid- to late 1940s also expressed anti-minority sentiment, in which minorities (Germans or Jews) were conceptualised as part of the exploitative strata—as either owners or managers, as Polish labour attempted to resurrect pre-war labour traditions. 24 Thus, the suppression of the multicultural past was also an attempt to refashion labour and reshape the moral geographies of the city.
The pre-war moral order was geographically expressed throughout the central areas of the city. At Ksiȩży Młyn, workers’ flats were positioned opposite the giant Scheibler textile complex, and Ogrodowa street divided the Poznański factory compound from workers’ tenements. Both complexes allowed factory managers to maintain oversight and control over the workforce through the control of space (flats, health care and recreational amenities), while the owners’ palaces next to the factories clearly impressed upon the population the social hierarchy. Elsewhere, along the main retail street, Piotrkowska, elegant street-facing buildings allowed the bourgeoisie to exhibit their social status, whilst the less prosperous were confined to gloomy courtyards to the rear. The poor crowded into back-to-back blocks along adjacent streets.
Consequently, during the course of the Polish Peoples’ Republic, the city authorities did not invest in sustaining the pre-war moral order as inscribed in the cityscape (though both the Scheibler and Poznański factories were re-opened under state control, and their associated palaces were often converted to public use as museums or galleries) and the physical fabric of the inner city experienced decline. 25 Instead, like in other socialist (and non-socialist) states, significant investment was guided to the outer areas of the city and the development of new urban units, often high-rise blocks of flats. The most significant exception to the overall trend was the construction of several high-rise apartment blocks on Piotrkowska street, collectively known as “Manhattan.” These flats are currently being upgraded. The aim was to provide increasing proportions of the city’s population with homes fit for human habitation, and these schemes were largely successful. Excluding the flats of the pre-socialist elite and the family villas at Julianów on the edge of the city, David Smith concludes:
If comparison is with what went before, in cities like Łódź, then for all the technical defects, the suburbs of the socialist era were a great advance on the housing and services inherited from the 19th and early 20th century.
26
However, the cost of remaking the geographic moral order was not negligible. The suppression of the city’s multicultural history, though “rational” and even “necessary” for the PPR/PZPR’s project of maintaining hegemony, sustained negative stereotypes about minority populations that the PZPR strategically exploited (as in 1968). 27 Similarly, the contemporary move to promote a particular vision of multiculturalism is grounded in wider socio-political processes—in this case post-socialist neo-liberalisation. As Michlic argues, “The city’s political and cultural elites have turned to the pre-1939 past to conceive and create a new post-communist, forward-looking European entity, where bourgeois and multicultural narratives are privileged.” 28
While the exclusions and absences that characterised dominant narratives in Łódź during the Polish Peoples’ Republic are increasingly well documented—for example, the omission of Jewish memory and history—and are rightly criticised, 29 the exclusions and absences encouraged by the newly hegemonic “Europeanisation” and multicultural narratives are largely ignored. An examination of such exclusions and absences, I argue here, exposes the limits of the “multiculturalism” promoted and reveals the class-based moral order being re-inscribed onto the cityscape.
One important strand of the overarching “Europeanisation” narrative has been an attempt to promote (limited) multiculturalism and tolerance through a selective evocation of Łódź’s pre-1939 multicultural history. On one hand, this has been a conscious strategy to revitalize the city, as Marek Czekalski, President of Łódź from 1994 to 1998, noted in 1996:
From the beginning as President I was searching for an idea on how to revitalize Łódź. Local history became the source of my inspiration. I have read a great number of books about old Łódź and have selected those elements from its history that constitute chief-markers of Łódź’s identity. Local traditions are one of the best assets of the city. The current inhabitants of Łódź have inherited the memory of an urban centre which developed in a rapid manner, was inclusive of people of various nationalities, and was open toward foreign capital. . . . I think that those traditions are good for our times, since, like one and a half centuries ago, we too are witnessing a major transformation.
30
On the other hand, the promotion of multiculturalism has been a response to an upsurge in intolerant sentiment which manifested itself in anti-Semitic graffiti around the city and at popular sporting events in the 1990s. Indeed, NGO activity, including “Days of Tolerance” at which volunteers painted over offensive graffiti around the city, galvanised officials at the town hall to act. 31 The painting event of 2000 was reported in the local and national press, and a television crew from Israel filmed it. Offensive graffiti is now more quickly removed by council workers and the council financially supports tolerance-promoting programmes. Council officials have been keen to highlight their adherence to “European norms” (not least to smooth access to EU funds). Intolerant sentiment is frequently dismissed as simply irrational and belonging to “backward” and/or “uneducated” segments of society, including football supporters. 32 However, this “explanation” fails to recognise the manner in which, at the national level, post-socialist transformation has depended upon the diversion of social anger from its economic sources (unemployment, withdrawal of welfare provision, poverty and gross inequality) to essentialised targets. David Ost, 33 for example, discusses the wider Polish context and shows the ways in which Solidarity activists supported the redirection of social anger to symbolic and mythical figures such as “communists, crypto-communists, liberals, non-believers, ‘foreigners’ (often defined as Poles who did not fit ‘Polish Catholic’ norms), criminals, and other assorted ‘aliens.’” 34
The appearance in the early 1990s of anti-Semitism without Jews 35 has to be recognised as being more than just intolerance of an essentially imagined Other. 36 Such intolerant sentiment provided a (diversionary) vent for social anger stemming from real socio-economic transformation throughout the country, allowing neo-liberal policies to advance further than if they had been seriously contested by the wider populace. However, the promulgation of essentialist negative stereotypes undermined the overarching “Europeanisation” narrative with its multicultural inflections in Łódź. Elite attempts to define cultural intolerance as belonging to particular segments of society—the poor, the uneducated, football supporters—therefore help to keep the multicultural agenda on track, as intolerance is posited as being a characteristic of particular marginal segments of society. In short, the neo-liberal pressures to discipline labour while commodifying cultural heritage and shaping a new identity for the city within the global circuit of capital are in tension. On one hand is the attempt to divert labours’ anger, and on the other is the assertion that the expression of this diverted anger is illegitimate.
The on-going process of disciplining labour through representational violence that frames the working classes as “pathological,” “aggressive,” and “violent” 37 is a key mechanism by which the real socio-economic and cultural concerns of the working classes of Łódź are being marginalised. In Łódź, once known as a city of female workers (largely in textile mills), disciplining labour has also meant disciplining women, and gender relations have been reconfigured to the disadvantage of many women. The changing class dynamics, in which the common experiences of a significant proportion of the city’s residents “are more likely to be of job loss and insecurity than social progression and achievement, and they are less likely to be experienced collectively,” 38 have undermined possibilities of labour responding as labour to the representational violence to which it has been subjected. Although Stenning referred to Nowa Huta, her point has resonance in post-socialist Łódź. And, as in Nowa Huta, in Łódź “working class histories, once a source of pride and propaganda, are now likely to be derided, or caricatured for economic gain.” 39 Representational violence, unlike Bourdieu and Wacquant’s notion of symbolic violence, 40 includes a “logic of ‘communicative interaction’ where some make propaganda aimed at others,” as well as pervasive stereotypes and unquestioned assumptions. Unquestioned assumptions about the socialist era, for instance, underpin the contemporary undervaluing of collective working-class identities and cultures. This has a real impact on the functioning of democratic practice in the city and the manner in which the “revitalisation” agenda is taking shape, and it is to this that I now turn.
Promoting Łódź: Challenges and Achievements
A decade ago Young and Kaczmarek sought to evaluate Łódź’s promotional strategy in a context in which “inter-urban competition and the manipulation of place image have become increasingly important.” 41 Social scientists amongst others have noted the shift to urban entrepreneurialism and new forms of governance (e.g., the shift from spatial Keynesianism to the competition state in the West) have forced cities to market themselves and increasingly invest in image promotion. 42 Young and Kaczmarek argued that Łódź’s relatively poor record in attracting foreign direct investment (it lagged behind cities such as Warsaw, Poznań, Wrocław, Katowice, Gdańsk, Kraków, and Szczecin) was related to its “image problem,” which fixed the city in its industrial past, dominated by the textile industry and characterised by factories, chimneys, and women workers. 43
By 1995 the city’s council recognised that it needed to project a new image to attract investment. Young and Kaczmarek argued that the council sought to develop several discursive themes that would reconfigure how the city was perceived. 44 These focused on its human resources, geographical location, traditions of international trade, the large and important higher education sector, and low costs (relative to other cities).
However, these authors noted that there was confusion as to whether it was the wider region or just the city that was to be promoted, with the result that neighbouring local authorities competed with the city for investment, claiming similar geographic centrality but offering lower costs. They also queried whether the frankness incorporated in the city’s promotional literature, which highlighted economic difficulties in the city as the reason why land and labour were relatively cheap, was wise. In addition, the claimed geographic centrality was compromised because of poor roads, undercapitalised railway provision, and the lack of an international airport.
In the intervening decade since Young and Kaczmarek analysed Łódź’s promotional strategy, many of the transport problems have been overcome. The city now has an international airport with flights to London, Berlin, Tel Aviv, and many other destinations, mainly operated by budget airlines. The railway line to Warsaw has recently been upgraded with substantial funds from the EU, and the current travel time between the two cities is one hour twenty minutes, which may be reduced further. The road network around the city is being modernised, again with EU funds, but the dearth of motorways in the wider region is an issue of continuing concern to the city, despite the fact that the Berlin–Warsaw motorway will pass nearby. Furthermore, substantial tax breaks and subsidies (largely funded by central and regional government) have attracted a range of multinational firms to set up in the city’s Special Economic Zones, creating several thousand jobs. This has helped to realise the McKinsey Company’s suggested economic growth strategy for the city (the consultancy’s report was co-financed by the EU), which called for developmental focus on four key areas. These were (1) business processes—offshoring, logistics; (2) household appliances (white goods); (3) manufacturing; and (4) the development of hardware and software production centres. 45 Companies such as Gillette, Dell, and Fujitsu have set up operations in the city, though the level of subsidy (57 million euros) awarded to Dell by the Polish Government has been the subject of an European Commission investigation through 2009 as Ireland complained about the shifting of jobs from Limerick. 46
The unemployment rate has for the past few years hovered below the national average, no doubt helped by jobs created by taxpayer-subsidised multinationals. The official rate for June 2009 was 8.3 per cent (compared with 10.6 per cent nationally). 47 It should also be noted that the city continues to experience population decline, from 807,000 in 1998 to 753,000 in 2007, from both natural decline and out-migration, 48 and this decline is projected to continue. 49 However, the council responded to educated youth seeking opportunities elsewhere, including in the United Kingdom, in 2008 by launching the programme “Youth in Łódź,” which attempts to close the gap between formal education and the workplace by encouraging companies in the city to provide scholarships and work placements to students in the city. 50 This programme together with the tightening of rules on welfare payments help to suppress the official level of unemployment.
The city council continues to emphasise Łódź’s centrality, transportation, human resources (more than hundred thousand students), low labour costs, and its culture, and now the development of high-class hotels. 51 However, place marketing has become increasingly sophisticated as the city seeks to attract not only private sector investment, but funds from central government and the EU. This has necessitated the reconfiguration of the council’s scalar reach and the forming of a series of partnerships with both public and private sector institutions and organisations, as well as subsuming particular projects under the rubric of perceived “best practice.” Examples include the creation of a town centre manager for Piotrkowska street in 2008, 52 the bid for the title of European City of Culture 2016 co-ordinated largely by the Łódź Art Centre, a cultural organisation funded by the council, as well as the massive EC1 project which seeks to comprehensively redevelop the central part of the city, including the main train station—Łódź Fabryczna. 53 The council has also formed partnerships with the regional government in order to operate a regional office in Brussels, which has amongst other objectives the goal to increase EU projects in the region and city and enhance access to EU structural funds. The office opened in 2004. 54 In addition, the council has sought out expert knowledge to strategically reposition the city within contemporary circuits of global capital and European funding mechanisms. Advice has been sought from consultancy firms such as McKinsey, from scholars based at the University of Łódź and, most recently, through a conference on the creative industries organised by the Łódź Art Centre. 55 The city has also benefitted from having good contacts with leading figures in central government and influential representatives in the Sejm and Senate over the past decade. Łódź was the constituency of the former Prime Minister (2001–2004), Leszek Miller of the Democratic Left Alliance, for example.
The overarching narrative of “Europeanisation” therefore aids communication amongst a diverse array of stakeholders both Polish and foreign and provides an important bridge linking the hard pursuit of EU and central government subsidy to capture multinational FDI and the softer, but no less important, efforts to re-imagine and rebrand the city. I now briefly turn to how the “revitalisation” agenda has been rolled out in Łódź through two important projects: European City of Culture 2016 and the exploitation of heritage and selected history along its main street—ul. Piotrkowska.
Heritage/History: Remaking ulica Piotrkowska
During the late 1990s the city’s promotional strategy priortised Piotrkowska street, a four-kilometre street long associated with retail functions, as a flagship area to represent the wider city. Subsequently, private and public money have worked to beautify this now mainly pedestrianised street. However, other private investments such as the building of several hypermarkets in the outer city, the development of the massive Manufaktura shopping and leisure complex on the site of the former Poznański textile factory and the opening of Galeria Łódzka on Pilsudskiego street (the main street which cuts across Piotrkowska), have clearly undermined the retail functions on Piotrkowska. 56 It is now mainly home to bars and restaurants, as up-market department stores have migrated to purpose-built shopping complexes, and the council contends that “business has stopped to perceive Piotrkowska as an attractive place to invest.” 57 Several substantial retail premises are currently empty and a series of “discount” clothes shops (selling clothes by the kilo for a couple of złoty) have opened up, attracting the “wrong” sort of resident to the street. Many policy makers and commentators within the city argue that the street has been deteriorating since around 2000, and the contention that “the street is not dying, it has already died” 58 is cited as the dominant public view.
Although the tension between sustaining the prestige of Łódź’s main street and promoting new retail complexes both nearby and in the outer city is recognised in the Local Action Plan for Piotrkowska, 59 the wider issues of intra-city place competition are not explored in any depth. Arguably, it is the previous rounds of subsidised private sector investment in retail and commercial activities away from Piotrkowska that have shifted the commercial centre of gravity of the city. The solution that was formulated under the rubric of URBAMECO, an EU project co-financed by the European Development Fund with the support of the city council and the marshal’s office, is to direct public money to “improving” the street. The proposed plans to counter the street’s further deterioration focus upon the aesthetic and, arguably, ways to exclude unwelcome groups. For instance, the Action Plan notes a problem in the “disparities between the promenade and its backyards, where degraded buildings with their degraded households contrast with the tourist, cultural and entertainment functions of the street” 60 and claims that residents of the street do not identify with it. 61 This contestable assertion can be understood as undermining local working-class households’ right to this key part of the city, which, together with the wider Europeanisation narrative that privileges bourgeois subjectivities and a limited multiculturalism that is blind to living working-class cultures, suggests that one of the unstated aims of the Action Plan is to reaffirm Piotrkowska as a middle-class and tourist playground.
The Action Plan advocates repairs to all housing and yards, and better lighting, but also calls for monitoring (CCTV?), city guard patrols, professional guards at restaurants, pubs and clubs, and the removal of the discount shops (that are used by many local residents). Indeed, Coleman’s argument made in relation to Britain’s CCTV revolution has resonance in Łódź: “The entrepreneurial city is fostering a new urban aesthetic emerging around the creation of privatised spaces for consumption within which proponents of CCTV elaborate a form of ‘regeneration-speak’ that provides ‘confidence’ to consumers, tourists and investors.” 62 Confidence, according to the Local Action Plan, can be restored to Piotrkowska street through improving security. The implied role allocated to the public purse would be to create conditions in which private investors (of the right quality) can be persuaded back to the street. 63 One way that this is being advanced is through the “best practice” of town centre management, which removes direct control over the street from the council to a semi-independent manager. As this change is seen as standard European practice, it gains further legitimacy.
The Local Action Plan also calls for education on the history of the street and Łódź more generally to enthuse the population about the advocated changes to be funded, in part, by the taxpayer. Some of the proposed education has already been physically grounded on the street through public art, mainly statues of prominent historical personalities from different national/ethnic backgrounds in a hyper-realist style. This includes the statues of Izrael Poznański, Karol Scheibler, and Ludwik Grohman, three of Łódź’s most significant factory owners in the nineteenth century (erected 2002), Julian Tuwim, 64 the poet and author of the 1944 lament and manifesto My, Żydzi Polscy (We, Polish Jews) (erected in 1999), Artur Rubinstein, the pianist (erected 2000), and Władysław Reymont, the Nobel prize winner for literature in 1924 (erected 2001). Through these statues, the city’s multicultural, capitalist, and elite histories are reaffirmed, though some tensions do exist which may allow these statues to become sites of contestation and places where alternative imaginings of the city can be developed. For example, Reymont’s scathing criticisms of social relations in the city detailed in his book The Promised Land (1899) are evidently not what the city council is calling reference to by erecting the statue. 65 It is rather the fact that a Polish writer achieved global recognition, which by proxy is supposed to lend the city kudos. The only statue on the street which, when encountered for the first time, seems out of place is the statue of the “Lamp Man” (erected 2007). It shows a worker changing a light bulb. But rather than commemorating a particular labour practice, the statue was commissioned to mark the 100th anniversary of the first electric street lights in the city and therefore links thematically to the other statues on the street, which allude to a particular notion of Progress.
European City of Culture
The European City of Culture 2016 title 66 was pursued to unlock a range of subsidies from both the EU and Central government, which could finance both physical regeneration and cultural programmes within the city. Łódź city officials took a strong interest in the preparations made by previous winners of the title, including Liverpool, and made official “fact-finding” visits. 67 So while the direct subsidy for European City of Culture was only 1.5 million euros, it represented a key pathway to attracting more substantial sums. Indeed, by mid-2009, the apparent tension which existed between Łódź Art Centre pursuing the European City of Culture title as a way to reinvigorate culture (narrowly defined) and the city council which saw the title as a way to achieve broader socio-economic objectives had been overcome, as witnessed at the conference on the Creative Industries that took place in the city in June 2009. 68
The European City of Culture bid was a key way in which “revitalisation” professionals embedded the “Europeanisation” discourse within the city. It was used as a way to galvanise investors to back the major EC1 project in the city centre, which would transform the inner city areas of the former power plant and railway station to a cultural zone with conference facilities, studios and galleries. The station (Łódź Fabryczna) would be placed underground, and adjacent streets named after the four main nationality groups that made up Łódź in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Poles, Germans, Jews, and Russians). 69
The most visible promotional activities for the European City of Culture bid took place not along Piotrkowska street, but at Manufaktura, where a permanent outdoor TV screened the 2016 campaign interspersed with adverts. Given that Manufaktura is a privatised public space (with its own security team), this immediately highlighted the question: for whom is Łódź 2016? No doubt the title would have been a major boost to Manufaktura (which has just opened a four-star hotel) and enhanced its claim to be the best shopping centre in Europe (according to messages on its outdoor TV). It would have also helped reposition and rebrand the city as the “European metropolis” that the city elite strive for, especially if sufficient funds could be secured to realise the EC1 project.
A further key element of the European City of Culture bid was the promotion of a specific notion of multiculturalism that drew heavily on a selective reading of Łódź’s history. The institutionalisation of the city’s multicultural vision took place in 2001 with the founding of the Festival of Dialogue between Four Cultures. The festival’s promotional blurb declared:
Four nations built this city from the very beginning. Poles, Jews, Germans and Russians all came here as immigrants seeking a New Land. . . . For almost two hundred years these four nations were able to find a common way of living. They learnt to be tolerant and to respect each other. The Unified Europe towards which we are now making our way took its first steps in Łódź. This spirit has been present since those old times in Łódź.
70
The city council’s awareness of the possibilities of public displays of memory to help re-narrate Łódź’s history and to reframe the present conjuncture was clearly demonstrated by the four days of events which marked the sixtieth anniversary of the liquidation of Łódź ghetto in 2004. These events, which had the full support of the President of Łódź, Jerzy Kropiwnicki, stood in marked contrast to the limited public ceremonies organised for the fiftieth anniversary in 1994, the low-key nature of which was heavily criticised by many people, including members of the Jewish community. A varied programme to mark the sixty-fifth anniversary was organised out of Kropiwnicki’s office and the city council’s bureau of promotion, tourism, and international co-operation and attracted visitors from around the world. 71
Important memorial events help raise Łódź’s cultural profile within Poland, which was particularly important prior to the announcement of European City of Culture since the city was directly competing with Lublin, Gdańsk, Poznań, Toruń, Szczecin, Wrocław, and Warsaw for the title. (Wrocław was declared winner of the title European City of Culture 2016 in 2011.) Heritage tourism plays a similar role and is currently being developed in the city at a rapid rate. 72 The city council seeks to fully exploit the economic potential of such tourism and attract individual tourists and scientific and business conferences to the city. It also assigns a key role to “heritage” in changing the image of the city and positioning it as a European cultural centre. Investment in cultural and heritage industries can help unlock significant funds from the EU. In the city, sizeable investments have been made into a range of cultural facilities, including a 3.85-million-euro grant to the textile museum and a 4.2-million-euro grant to the museum of modern art. 73
Exclusions
The focus of “revitalisation” efforts on the city centre is part of a long-term strategy to transform the everyday of the central districts. “Europeanisation” and “multiculturalism” are the two most significant overarching narratives justifying massive public intervention in the reconstruction of social space and social practice. Yet despite significant research into the life conditions of residents in this area, for example Starosta, Frykowski, and Bujwicka, 74 little attempt has been made to reframe the problem from a fetishisation of place (this area is in a bad way) to more human-focused interventions that would prioritise the needs of residents. Instead, local residents are frequently characterised as part of the problem undermining or obstructing the “revitalisation” agenda. In its rationale for changing the Local Action Plan, the council called for efforts to “change the approach of inhabitants.” 75
Many residents are unable to pay for improvements to upgrade the standard of their flats or the block in which they live. 76 Floor space per inhabitant is below the city average, and there is a concentration of unemployed and low-paid workers. 77 The frequently poor condition of many architecturally valuable buildings is often “blamed” on the residents, not the owners (most often the local council) or managing agents. 78 Some residents are therefore open to offers of better equipped flats out of their neighbourhood. This, together with a perceived “rent gap,” 79 creates the potential for significant gentrification of the inner areas—a plan implicitly endorsed by the council’s “revitalisation” agenda and legitimated by the contestable assertion that people do not identify with their neighbourhoods. 80 Initial waves of gentrification have already taken place within the city centre, while adjacent blocks continue to deteriorate, bringing the winners and losers of post-socialism into close proximity. This proximity may contribute to (middle-class) anxiety about crime, “youth criminality,” and a “growing feeling of unsafety” 81 and encourage calls to radically “revitalise” the central districts, with the implied demand that social housing be replaced by privately owned housing, and the imposition of a new moral geography.
Though less affluent residents are fearful of insecurity (crime) in their neighbourhoods, widespread stereotypes of the poor (and the working class more generally) identify them as the sources of insecurity in these areas as the sociologist Elżbieta Tarkowska has noted. 82 They are depicted as threatening and thereby inhibiting middle-class enjoyment of some parts of the city centre. The stigmatisation of places and people further “legitimates” radical change in the city’s central areas.
Arguably, the pursuit of “Europeanisation” and “multicultural” narratives depends in part on a ready pool of underpaid labour in the privileged retail, hospitality, and cultural sectors. Readily acknowledged in Łódź’s promotional literature, the relatively low wages help to produce a virtuous (from the investors’ point of view) circle of investment opportunities. Low pay and working poverty are a key element of the current strategy, and those marginalised economically are also being progressively marginalised not just in the core consumer semi-privatised spaces of the city but potentially through the central districts as projects such as EC1 and new plans for Piotrkowska and its enclosed side streets take concrete form.
Conclusion
The problems of the current “revitalisation” strategy in Łódź are multiple and echo many of the concerns about city regeneration expressed in other parts of the world. 83 However, in the post-socialist context, radical urban change, as illustrated by Łódź, is being legitimated by narratives of “Europeanisation” and by the efforts to reframe the identity of the city through reference to a Golden multicultural past. The greatest irony of course is that Łódź is largely nationally homogeneous and the real differences within the city, for example, class cleavages, gay and lesbian identities, gender and national differences other than the privileged “historic” minorities, are rarely celebrated and frequently suppressed/repressed. The presence of migrants from south-east Asia is not celebrated to any great extent.
There is considerable merit in retrieving the previously obscured past, memorialising those groups which made Łódź, and recognising the tragedies which destroyed the pre-1939 population configuration of the city. However, the limits of the “multicultural” project as it is currently constituted and the manner in which it feeds into the “Europeanisation” narrative to marginalise voices of the working classes in particular need to be recognised. On the one hand, the “multicultural” project arguably functions to provide just enough education to city residents to ensure the smooth running of heritage and roots-based tourism rather than developing a critical knowledge of the past. On the other hand, it provides the rhetorical tools to exclude those groups who (regrettably and counter-productively) express class conflicts in the register of nationality from the debate about the future of the city, while failing to acknowledge the way in which radical socio-economic change in Poland, including Łódź, has been advanced by the transference of social anger. 84 Contemporary institutionalised multiculturalism in Łódź is neither frank about the complexity of the city’s past nor is it truly “multicultural,” as some important living cultures are excluded and derided.
The council’s current multicultural strategy fetishises the city’s multicultural past and obscures the national and ethnic tensions which marked the city’s development. Although the council pursues policies which acknowledge the city’s “historic” minorities, and is sensitive to the concerns of the very small remaining communities of these “historic” minorities, the dominant narrative about inter-community relations has yet to confront some uncomfortable episodes in the city’s history. Recent debates in Poland on Polish–Jewish relations in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, stimulated in a large part by Jan Gross’s book Fear, 85 question the tenor and substance of the dominant narrative and are likely to affect how multicultural discourse in Łódź is reshaped in the future.
At the same time, the council generally overlooks new minorities and the wider tolerant impulse of multiculturalism. However, the council’s support of “historic” minorities should not be conceived as merely a side-benefit of the city’s efforts to commodify its multicultural past, important though this is. These “historic” minorities have been important in the post-socialist period as Poland rebuilt its relationships with Israel and Germany in particular, and these minority communities have been able to ensure that state agencies respond to the requirements of the new minority rights regime that has been rolled out in East Central Europe. 86 In contrast, new minorities and other social groups have so far been unable to accumulate sufficient political capital at local, national, or international levels to force the council to take their concerns more seriously.
It is also striking that the history of women is largely forgotten in the dominant narrative about the city. Not only was Łódź known as a city of women workers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but female workers played a key role in shaping Łódź’s social and physical fabric. The fact that women do not feature strongly in either the current multicultural or Europeanisation narratives readily illustrates the scale of exclusions that the current “revitalisation” project fosters.
The city council, the marshal’s office, and other key players such as Łódź Art Centre have attempted to generate specific policies which, in part, can ease access to substantial and indeed city changing grants from the EU’s various funds. Substantial funding is indeed required to improve both the physical fabric of the city after years of underinvestment and the standard of living of its residents. However, the current exclusions practised under the rubric of “Europeanisation” severely undermine social justice in the city. Representational violence (stereotypes of the poor as uneducated, drunk, criminal, and intolerant) 87 link with the structural violence of post-socialism, that includes unemployment, welfare withdrawal, and disinvestment from social housing, to re-make and re-new the capitalist geographies of the city centre.
At this point it is far from clear how the “Europeanisation” and “multicultural” agenda will attract support outside its elite constituency in the coming years. Those fortunate enough to have been hired on relatively good wages (in the Łódź context) by the multinational companies attracted to the city by, amongst other reasons, EU and Polish government subsidies could well become supporters. 88 There is evidence that some efforts to improve the built environment, and prestige projects that “put Łódź on the map,” have public support. This includes a poll conducted by Gorący temat (Hot topic), a leading weekly television programme on TVP Łódź, for its 17 April 2009 edition which considered regeneration efforts in the city, and the positive response that the Manufaktura complex has received from the local population. However, the wider agenda of pushing a “bourgeois ethos” and a particular “multicultural history” agenda may prove more difficult, as Michlic notes. 89 This is not only because most of the city’s residents have working-class backgrounds but because such an agenda has high costs for many residents, such as the continued disinvestment from social housing, particularly in the central areas.
One of the key tasks then for those concerned about creating a more socially just city is to re-imagine the possible and reclaim a stake in the city. The dissonant heritage of the city suggests many possibilities. A starting point could be to retrieve Piotrkowska street as a public space, to challenge the particular elite narratives of “Europeanisation” and (limited) “multiculturalism” which are so strongly inscribed along it. Site-specific interventions by concerned citizens that focus on the street architecture, including the statutes, could prove galvanising and may allow a notion of Europeaness to emerge that is decoupled from the neo-liberalism that currently saturates the “Europeanisation” discourse. Similarly, attempts towards “managerialisation” of the street by unelected and unaccountable technicians (advocated under the rubric of “best practice”) can be contested from a range of perspectives.
However, it seems imperative that social cleavages are articulated in the appropriate (economic) register and a genuine multiculturalism is advanced that does not neglect contemporary difference while rediscovering the complexity of the past. The limited multiculturalist agenda that partly depends on representational violence directed at the poor and the working classes is contradictory in the sense that this violence ultimately returns as a direct challenge to the new image of the city in the form of intolerance, anti-Semitic graffiti, and generalised anger. Challenging representations of the poor and working classes, and viewing “working-classness” not as a condition to be alleviated but as a series of living cultures, would be important steps in helping to reframe and democratise the regeneration strategy in the city. But any such strategy which limits itself to interventions at the local level could only achieve limited success at best. For example, improving the state of social housing (and thereby enhancing the everyday life of current city centre residents) requires radical policy changes at the town hall and at the national and European levels. Any challenge to the current remaking of the city has to be multiscalar and, at the same time, an attempt to reconstitute the scalar practices which configure the city in wider networks of commerce, politics, and culture.