MBA Kraków 2023

The modern city needs change. What we mean by a city here is a group of people, and an immanent feature of people is the constant desire for change. Their pace and scope has been increasing dynamically over the centuries.

A city is also a structure, and this changes in a different way: longer, harder, perhaps more dramatically? After all, building matter used to be durable.

There is a certain ‘unevenness’ to those changes generated by the heterogeneity of their rhythms. There is also a certain cyclicity in these changes: the mental of the inhabitants, as well as the physical shape of the city. This provides an opportunity to return to spaces in the city already enshrined earlier, but covered by later layers. Earlier city spaces are seem to be familiar and thus more easily acceptable, and even so, the unveiling adds a new quality to them.

The process of the eruption of the scale of the city, the dominance of infrastructure (especially the automobile), realised at the expense of cosiness – has led to a nostalgia for earlier models of the city, visible either in iconography or in anthropogenic material deposits.

Nostalgia, but also the inadequacies of the quality of contemporary city space, make us focus on qualities that touch on the senses of a city’s existence. And one important sense is the meeting of people. It is desirable to provide as many opportunities to meet as possible in the urban space. It is necessary to create places from scratch, but also to recover and rebuild lost places, found in the memory and previously present in the overlapping layers of construction and the earth’s crust.

Places, in turn, need to be connected by efficient access routes. Together they form the ‘space between buildings’, and consist of roads, streets, squares, plazas and parks. This is where the life of each agglomeration – social, economic, cultural, – is concentrated. And if such records already exist, it is imperative to use them, to read them, to find their traces hidden in relics and to recover them. It is necessary to begin the process of restoring these records, reactivating them and ‘heal’ the city. The city has to be recovered.

– under construction –