I BUSES, TRAMS, TRAINS

Igor Piotrowski, Włodzimierz K. Pessel

Take the first tram, but not just any first tram

Igor Przybylski talks to Xavery Stańczyk

Archeology of transport

Ger Duijzings

Urban trajectories: anthropology of movement in the making

Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga

Identities of urban mobility – looking for a flâneur’s successor

Julia Kempa

A city like a labyrinth. In the trap of the Buenos Aires Bus network

Łukasz Bukowiecki

Warsaw citydrawing. The history of how the construction of a grade-separated city railway was planned

Agnieszka Karpowicz

„Autobusiarnia” by Miron Białoszewski. City transport as an act of communication

Igor Piotrowski

City Transport in Warsaw – propositions and inspirations

Tomasz Z. Pieńkowski

Trolleybuses in the history and culture of Lublin

II FROM THE WORKSHOPS OF CULTURAL STUDIES

Anna Giza-Poleszczuk

UEFA Euro 2012 Poland-Ukraine: The obsession of infrastructure and the absence of the „society”

Włodzimierz Karol Pessel

Cultural scientist in Warsaw. The Laboratory of Urban Studies – ongoing project

Mateusz Żurawski

Anatomy of a pantograph

III CULTURE OBSERVATORY

Barbara Budyńska, Małgorzata Jezierska

Library politics and financing public libraries in Poland

IV REVIEWS

Piotr Kubkowski

The Rynek in Kraków and the European modernity

Anna Maj

Art in the times of participation

Olga Dawidowicz-Chymkowska

Between the hand and the paper

Anna Nacher

Media cultures – immersion in the deep time

Monika Murzyn-Kupisz

The city triumphant

This essay is an attempt to define an ‘anthropology of movement’ as a part of contemporary urban anthropology, where one of the problems of fieldwork is how to portray the lives of subjects on their daily itineraries through the city and capture the complex, large-scale, mobile, and transient urban environments in ethnography. Even though mobility does not fit easily within anthropology – with its usual focus on bounded and rooted communities – the author argues that the anthropologists should adapt to the conditions of contemporary urban life, abandon the traditional areas of research and turn towards the research of mobility and movement. The author suggests to complement Roger Sanjek’s study of ‘urban pathways’ with an examination of urban trajectories, in the form of the daily traffic journeys people make and interactions occurring between strangers on the move. The city has a a dynamic of its own, emerging from the fluctuating connections between dots on the map marking the lines along which people move, randomly or routinely, creating (or failing to create) the conditions for ‘synekism’ and urban conviviality. The author argues for experimental research methods and using video recording techniques.

The paper examines the problem of contemporary identities associated with urban mobilities, the different ways of experiencing the city through its various means of transport. The discussion of urban identity has long been dominated by the focus on city walkers and the paper starts by considering the reasons behind the century-long domination of the flâneur and a relative lack of interest in more mobile urbanites. Among these crucial seem the interdisciplinary roots of the flâneur figure, which starting from the first dialogue of Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin combined literature and philosophy, theory and practice, poetry and scholarship. Throughout the twentieth century, the flâneur functioned as a strong and flexible metaphor, constantly evolving, modified by various thinkers and languages. In his travels through different texts and contexts, the flâneur functioned as a useful tool in combining different disciplines and scholarly methods; paving the ways for interdisciplinary thinking about the city. The second part of the paper embarks on a search for equally flexible identities associated with urban mobilities and locates them in urban crash cultures, in commuting and in traffic jams. The protagonists of these different ways of experiencing city mobility are found in the novels by Charles Dickens, J. G. Ballard and Don DeLillo and in theoretical texts that dialogue with these literary contexts. Dangerous, risky driving exemplified by the characters in Ballard’s Crash, routine, repetitive train journeys of contemporary commuters and broken yet synchronized mobility of the daily odyssey in a jammed city, as portrayed in DeLillo’s Cosmopolis are all analysed as worthy successors of the flâneur.

Buenos Aires is a labyrinth of the New World, an infinite American “and so on” kind of city of straight lines and right angles. At the same time its structure if closed-ended, the city if an isle in the sea of pampa. A reflection of the blueprint of a metropolis and simultaneously of a maze of the city is the guía „T”, the most popular map guidebook of the bus network of Buenos Aires. The complex method of consulting the guide and the chaotic operations of the bus network evokes a model of a contemporary labyrinth-rhizome. The movements of the buses draw invisible and incomprehensible trajectories, and their looks refers to a gambling game. Coincidence and endless wondering are the experience of the inhabitants of this contemporary city, whereas the literature created by the writers from Buenos Aires – the record of human existence – confirms the feeling of being lost in a maze with no centre. Guía „T” and the bus network of Buenos Aires become a pretext to discuss the eternal question of the labyrinth and its design in the Argentinean context.

The author begins with an analysis of the problems with the legal and social definition of the metro in the context of the multitude of rail traffic in the cities. Then he presents the history of metro construction in Warsaw, discussing it as a story of planning and metropolitan imagery. He puts forth a thesis that the development of the metro is an imposed, centralized battle for a civilizational change in the public mass transportation, which is being led without any consideration of the economic or environmental costs based on an assumption that the inevitable change will be for the best. Thereby the underground railway, which is a symbol of a civilizational leap, is at the same time an object of a constant battle, either against nature, the city’s geological and hydrological conditions or its space and functional order already in place.

Based on the information contained in Miron Białoszewski’s diaries it is possible to reconstruct the itineraries of Warsaw buses in the years 1975–6, when the bus lines were subject to great many changes, mostly due to the construction of the Central Railway Station and the Łazienkowska Way. Travelling by bus allows Białoszewski to watch the process of modernization of Warsaw, which makes unstable and volatile the basic spatial categories, including urbanity and sub-urbanity, centre and peripheries. Chamowo is a record of these developments, but the lines of city transport and the way of moving around the city are transformed here into an act of communication which is at the same time a basis for Białoszewski’s artistic and existential standpoint.

The author’s starting point are two images of Warsaw trams as presented in songs by Sydney Polak and by the British band The Style Council, in order to demonstrate that a tram may become not only a key element in getting to know the city (by an autochthon and by a visitor from beyond the Iron Curtain respectively), but that it is a non-accidental, significant means of transportation. Supremacy of trams in the culture of the Polish capital is demonstrated based on Wiech’s feuilletons, fantasy literature, films, TV series and scientific monographs. The author locates the afterwar history of tram network against the background of the stories of autobuses, tramways and taxis, politics and class structure, accounting for the variety of their cultural connotations. The author also proposes that the term „komunikacja” (communication), as present in the phrases „komunikacja publiczna” (public transport) and „komunikacja miejska” (urban transport) need not necessarily be an empty word.. It would be a good thing to draw conclusions from this word, which the author does in the second part of the text, focusing on the past trajectories, based on the examples of Leopold Tyrmand and Andrzej Dobosz.

The text is a rare example of combining two competences: scientific one, that of a historian of art, who can thematize the esthetics of city infrastructure, and the one of a city activist and an enthusiast of ecological and vintage streetcars. The subject matter of the text are the trolleybuses, which in Polish cities are typically more of a curiosity than a practical solution. Lublin is an interesting counter-example to be analyzed in this context, because the trolleybuses are perceived as one of its symbols and the markers of the city’s identity. The author points out that the unusual form of a bus with two arches on its roof expresses the rhythm of Lublin’s functioning, its character and dynamics.

In the debate on the benefits of Euro 2012 it Has been commonly stressed that hosting the Championships would be a chance to raise the quality of public governance and increasing the effectiveness of achieving common goals. These debates, focusing on the infrastructural issues, showed the prevalence of economy in thinking of public affairs and the absence of positive understanding of “society” as a creative and active agent, the source of order in every day practices, the initiator of activities able to articulate its own voice and, finally, a partner to a dialogue. The preparations to Euro 2012 were not socialized – but this event may become a turning point in our way of thinking about the “society”.

The text presents the program of the Laboratory of Urban Studies (Pracownia Studiów Miejskich), a new scientific group established at the Institute of Polish Culture at the University of Warsaw. The main point of this program is its Warsaw-centered profile, preference for the locality over the globality and the transient intellectual trends. It does not entail the lack of interest in the European matters, in particular those of Central and Eastern Europe as a reservoir of comparative material. Warsaw is a city whose culture (not only the architectonic one) has lost its continuity. Many grass-top or imposed attempts to reinstate it (just as the signs of melancholy expressed in particular in the topos of the “Warsaw not rebuilt”) are a very plausible research subject. Moreover, the text expresses the view that the source dominant in this kind of research is language evidence, enriched by a whole range of semiotic means used in contemporary culture. Members of the Laboratory are interested in the practices of the city inhabitants and the spatial stories about them and not the philosophies attached to the city realities.

A ‘pantograph’ is a keyword that evokes the theatre of Jerzy Grzegorzewski. The director himself claimed that introducing this object to the stage was his greatest contribution to the history of theatre. Beginning with a dictionary definition and a technical description of various types of a pantograph, through determining what particular model was used in Grzegorzewski’s performances, we finally come to a conclusion that this mechanism actually appeared only in few shows. And yet it has been remembered, perhaps due to its disturbing form, susceptible to being filled with diverse meanings. Detached from a tram roof, a pantograph became an object which is odd, hard to identify or place in reality. Even more so – due to its ability of mechanical change of form – it proved to be a perfect partner for an actor, with whom it could interact in different ways. Besides all that, it still remained just a pantograph – a ready-made object – and thus a symbol of so called classical avant-garde, a tradition from which springs the theatre of Jerzy Grzegorzewski.

Library politics is a part of public policy in the broad sense. Its scope becomes particularly important after social and political changes in Poland, mainly as far as finances of the institutions of culture are concerned. The first experiences of the libraries operating in new systemic conditions have shown that the state is an indispensible actor in their maintenance and development. In the recent years, the policy of the ministry of culture towards the libraries has been a part of this mechanism. From the point of view of the libraries it is advantageous to have a diversified packet of governmental operations in the form of programs and projects, which would be adequately financed and supported by a co-operation of interested non-profit organizations.

Nathaniel D. Wood, Becoming Metropolitan. Urban Selfhood and the Making of Modern Cracow, Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb 2010.

Ryszard W. Kluszczyński, Sztuka interaktywna. Od dzieła-instrumentu do interaktywnego spektaklu, Wydawnictwa Akademickie i Profesjonalne, Warszawa 2010.

Paweł Rodak, Między zapisem a literaturą. Dziennik polskiego pisarza w XX wieku, Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, Warszawa 2011.

Siegfried Zielinski, Archeologia mediów: o głębokim czasie technicznie zapośredniczonego słuchania i widzenia, przeł. Krystyna Krzemieniowa, Oficyna Naukowa, Warszawa 2010.

Kino po kinie. Film w kulturze uczestnictwa, red. Andrzej Gwóźdź, Oficyna Naukowa, Warszawa 2012.

Régis Debray, Wprowadzenie do mediologii, przeł. Alina Kapciak, Oficyna Naukowa, Warszawa 2010.

Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier, The Penguin Press, New York 2011.