RE: Co się dzieje z naszym miastem? Kilka słów o rozwoju przestrzeni miejskiej. Część 1.
Siema! Unfortunately I cannot respond po Polsku to properly express myself, which seems to be what most of your audience speaks/reads. Also I'm not sure how much of the meaning was lost in the Google translation, so bear with me. Nonetheless, here are my thoughts po Angielsku.
I feel like the natural evolution is that people will go where there is work, but more so where there is money. Regardless of the quality of life.
It is a "double-edged sword" and it is also cyclical.
People tend to leave their small suburban town or "powiat" (Google couldn't translate this on its own - I later found out it meant county, I think) and move to the city for work. Most people however will also want to potentially own a home or start a family. If they can't afford to do this in the city or if they want a "better lifestyle," they will move out of the city and back to the suburban town.
In larger metropolitan cities the idea of not finding a job or of there being no jobs available is rare. But for the last 10 years in Greece for example, people in larger cities began moving out. They weren't even going to suburban areas but back to the villages and rural areas. They were looking to take advantage of the land again, because now money wasn't even their real concern. It was essentially survival and maybe pride. Of course this is an extreme example due to the financial crisis, the inherently corrupt government and the poor infrastructure. (I won't discuss further the why or how I believe this is happening.) Not that it isn't possible to happen elsewhere, if it isn't already.
So could large scale architecture or urban planning be capable of dealing with issues like these? Perhaps in modern times when the world is a smaller place, and larger distances (from cities) don't matter that much for business to thrive. Unfortunately I still think it all comes down to money (if not simply greed). In business nothing really seems to matter except the deal, the money, the efficiency - what makes more sense for all parties involved to just make a profit.
So how do you transform an abandoned part of town or how to you bring people back to a suburban or rural county, when there is a more lively or advantageous city or part of the city?
It seems to just take time, for the human machine or civilization to run its course and for the cycle to slowly but surely start over.
Maybe this issue is one of the human mentality, the imbalance of power and wealth and the fact that people are jealous and greedy. And that there isn't really much you can do to change it, without gaining a bit of your own power and wealth. Whether it's as an individual or as a collective whole. Or in your case through architecture and planning on the urban scale.
Then there are the many other sub-factors that change the dynamic of both the problem and the potential solution. The scale of planning. Is planning focused around the car or the person? That brings us to environmental impact. Is global warming real? Does the car affect it? Is the city or the town more efficient? How do you plan on an urban level to address that? How do you change the way we use energy in either scenario? Re-using and adapting existing, abandoned areas or structures is a start. But there are a lot more unanswered questions.
OK I'll stop there...
Thank you for your comment! It’s interesting input on problems of urban planning in the US or Greece. Problems of urban design in Polish cities differ for many reasons, including eg. political and historical ones and I will write about that in my next post! All the best!