The 'city without a centre'

The renowned Polish journalist, Seweryn Blumsztajn, recalls his first visit to Warsaw as a 5-year old in the spring of 1951: ‘We arrived with my parents at the Central Station. We piled into a horse-drawn carriage (there were no taxis in those days) and drove through a sea of ruins and barracks. My parents asked me how did I like the city? I replied that in the pictures at elementary school it had seemed more beautiful.’ 50 years later, and driving by the Palace of Culture in the centre of the city, a jumble of box-shops, car parks and other vacant concrete spaces, he is reminded once more of his first impression of Warsaw – an impression of ‘chaos and ugliness’. How can it be, he asks, that at the very heart of the capital city, there is a giant hole? A vast nothingness? ‘A centre with no centre’.

When I step out into the crude urban maze of Warsaw city centre, I can’t help but have similar feelings. Structured around a huge roundabout where buses, trams, taxis, cars, and vans wrangle their way through the honking, heaving traffic to their respective destinations, I am struck by the sense that the centre of Warsaw is a space of permanent migration – a space everyone is moving through, past, via, away from, even under – the underground pedestrian highway constantly ticking with the clock-wise movement of hurried feet on their way to somewhere. The ‘centre’ isn’t a place people seem to want to be, belying the very significance of a ‘centre’ – rather it’s a transitory throughway to other, better places. It is the heart of the city only in that it pumps life away from itself in irregular, patient spasms (like the one-line Metro serving the entire metropolis). It reminds me of the mechanism of a giant magnet but on the negative end, repelling iron filings with a force that cannot be resisted. Everyone seems to be in a hurry to leave the centre. At night, it is left stranded, empty, abandoned almost. Shut down after a hard days’ work. This city sleeps.

The other factor I can’t shake that creates this feeling of a ‘centre with no centre’ is the globalised façade of the EveryWhere. It seems ironic that in the place where stands the ‘Palace of Culture and Science’, there is a gaping lack of culture, and a gaping lack of a logistical science to the composition. There are cinemas, museums, theatres, yes, but this could be Anywhere. Looking up on the crossroads of the main arteries of Al. Jerozlimskie and Ul. Marszalkowska, all around grey Soviet-style blocks and glass-fronted monoliths compete for the sky. Giant billboards, some of the largest in Europe, and certainly the most numerous of any European capital, plaster the upholstery, often blocking out the light for the unlucky inhabitants behind. Neon lights flash their splashy texts. The corporate logo screams, gasping for air atop the skyscrapers. Sony, Olympus, Bosch, Novotel, Samsung, LG, Indesit, Konica, Era, Peugeot, Nokia, JVC – I’ve just taken you on a 360° panoramic trip around the city skyline, standing in just one spot. Glassy, multi-storeyed shopping centres occupy centre-stage, wowing consumers with extravagant contemporary architecture that distracts the eye, momentarily, from the scruffy scaffolds that surround. The city centre is ‘brandalised’; a vast vortex of consumed space, where ‘place’ – that point we know, we love, we identify with – has seemingly not been recovered here since 1945. This is a centre of buildings, concrete, adverts and logos – not of people. If this is just an inevitable part of 21st Century urban reality, nowhere is it more visible than here – a city entirely remodelled over the past 20 years. Hungry for capitol, has Poland sacrificed its capital?

In a beautifully academic moment, I sometimes think of Warsaw Centre as a symbol of Poland’s as yet unclear identity, direction, self-image, as well as its apparent love affair with the West. An unknown unclear destiny awaits both Poland and the centre of Warsaw… Does the emerging identity being forged right in the heart of the nation’s capital reflect the kind of future Poland wants? If so, what kind of future is this? What kind of identity? In a recent promotional video to try and gain the title of ‘European Capital of Culture’ for 2016, Warsaw cashes in on this idea of uncertainty, but by presenting itself as a capital that is constantly changing, adapting, growing - a capital ‘reborn by culture’. Warsaw is still being reborn, it is true. What finally happens at its centre is yet to be seen – and yet to be decided. Poland’s future manifests itself here: Cosmopolitan? Or banally modern? Artistic? Or brash? Green? Or devastatingly unsustainable? Diverse? Or monolithically consumer-oriented? Progressive? Or reactionary? Reborn by careless corporate cash? Or ‘reborn by culture’? Warsaw centre – you decide!

To venture outside of the centre is to discover the pulse and true cultural gems of the city. Warsaw has to be discovered – this is true. Speaking to many of my Polish acquaintances, it seems Warsaw is a city that takes time to uncover. A city that reveals itself slowly, discretely, shyly. You have to put in some effort! I’m learning this – slowly, but surely, a love affair is starting…