The article is fromA&B issue03|23
We have learned to understand cities as administrative creations. We remember their shapes as the outlines of formal boundaries. In doing so, we lose touch with living cities, spilling over and transforming their internal structure. We think about them in a way that makes it difficult to solve problems. And sometimes - also seeing them.
I don't trust definitions. This confession should basically eliminate from academic life, where - according to the perceptions of the majority - everything is based on the precision of language. And on the belief that it is possible to arrange such precisely defined concepts into a coherent whole. However, those who succeed in doing so usually come into conflict with reality, perceive it as a tangle of irrational actions and phenomena, lose the desire for research and sometimes even interest in the area under study.
There are things to define that are easy - like an association or a company - and difficult - like a state or a city. Here each definition loses more than it covers. Only by learning more than one way of defining things can we feel that we understand more from a city or state. Not surprisingly, for most scientists to study them accurately, it is enough that states and cities have their boundaries. However, they have them in other ways. States border other states or there is a natural maritime border. Cities border towns and non-cities, which are not worth hastily calling villages. And even so, their administrative boundaries do not allow us to discover the essence of urbanity. Sometimes they can even be misleading.
The real boundary of a city was the city walls. But we haven't had such cities for a long time. Every later boundary was conventional. It delineated the scope of authority of local authorities, but described neither real communities nor real ways of shaping space. Increasingly, it included sparsely urbanized areas. Until it became such that it delineates almost nothing.
Nowadays, the administrative boundaries of most Polish cities extend far beyond the urbanized area, encompassing - even in the case of Warsaw or Krakow - villages and farmland. The passion for expanding borders to include such areas was most prevalent in the People's Republic of Poland, but it began as early as the interwar period, and even after 1989 it did not disappear completely. Suffice it to mention the case of Rzeszow, which still had only 53.7 square kilometers at the beginning of the 21st century, only to grow to 126.6 just before the end of the second decade. This jump took place during the term of just one president, Tadeusz Ferenc.
Happily, some mistakes related to the administrative expansion of cities were noticed and corrected. The incorporation into Tychy in 1975, on the occasion of the Gierek-era reform of administrative division, of the towns of Bieruń, Imielin and Lędziny, as well as several rural municipalities, turned out to be an idea that had to be withdrawn after a dozen years or so. In the case of Imielin - even after several. This was due to the democratization of the 1990s and the giving of a more authentic character to self-government. Pressure from city residents who did not want to remain within a larger and artificial organism won out. Tychy, approaching two hundred thousand residents, lost a third of its population overnight, returning almost to its pre-reform shape. The same happened to Wodzislaw Slaski, where a series of referendums in the 1990s led to the exclusion of the towns of Rydułtowy, Pszów and Radlin, as well as the municipality of Marklowice.
In most areas, however, changes involving the expansion of city boundaries are irreversible. And, to tell the truth, an attempt to correct the administrative map would be an action that makes little sense. This is because today it is administrative boundaries as such that are a serious obstacle to our political and planning imagination. They make us look for answers in the wrong place.
The blurring of the administrative edges of cities
© Kingdom of Science | Pixabay
Even if they remain useful in some dimensions for a long time to come, the most important skill we should possess is the art of dealing with the blurring of administrative city boundaries. The art of skillfully applying different ways of understanding urbanity more even than the city. The change that information technology has brought to our minds makes it very easy to develop new patterns of behavior. Not only do we easily imagine overlapping maps, but most of us can construct and use them with simple tools.
We can easily recognize that the phenomena to which the administration and other public structures must respond are dynamic in nature. We know that large retail chains or mobile operators flexibly adapt their offers to changing user preferences and needs. And that this does not require hiring highly qualified people with difficult salary expectations, but using correctly constructed algorithms. What's more, the smart city fad has already paved the way for such thinking in municipal offices.
At the simplest level for our imagination, which is the observation of traffic and the organization of public transport connections, it is quite obvious that administrative boundaries should not play any role. The same can be seen, by the way, when we follow the kilometer grid distribution data relevant to this traffic, available after the last census on the CSO website. Squares with a population of several thousand people are usually found in urban centers and on blocks of flats. However, the urban level is also 3-4 thousand residents per kilometer, and we also increasingly find such "squares" in areas outside the borders of urban municipalities.
Similarly, we will meet in the largest cities areas where not even a thousand people live per square kilometer. And which have retained the settlement characteristics of villages. Not only, by the way, visible to the "naked eye", but also when it comes to voting behavior, similar to neighboring rural municipalities rather than nearby settlements. This can be perfectly seen not only in the aforementioned Rzeszow, but also in the outskirts of Cracow. Everywhere else, a large percentage of residents of neighboring villages have voted for the Law and Justice party or supported the presidential candidacy of Andrzej Duda in recent years.
Electoral similarity, however, is shown by some suburban municipalities. Mainly those that are expanding due to investments by wealthier city residents. They are the ones who create the many links between the until recently rural areas and the city they surround. These links are the use of public services - schools, kindergartens, health centers or libraries, but also the daily commute to work, shopping, entertainment. It's a shift of daily activity away from the area where we live.
When we see a city through the prism of such a colorful kilometer grid, we lose sight of the arbitrariness of administrative boundaries. Comparing data from the previous census, we see the dynamics of urban fabric development. And we can easily translate the change in the colors of individual squares into the language of developers and individual housing projects. We see a movement that, if administrative boundaries were to be taken seriously, should cause some kind of change or adjustment. But it doesn't, although it has been intensifying not for one or two years, but for decades.
It is over such a long period of time that the population of the surrounding communities benefits from a municipal hospital, high school or technical school, cinema or shopping mall. The last two decades have seen such ties only intensify. And there is no indication that we are ever going to turn back from this path. So it's worth recognizing that it's time to adjust the logic of state and city functioning in three important areas to these phenomena: public finance, planning and investment, and the territorial aspects of political power. For years now, the local governments of large cities have been trying to stop the flight of taxpayers to suburban municipalities. They are trying to establish common ways with these municipalities to integrate transportation functions or certain municipal services, to get along - as in the case of Krakow - to fight smog together. This is not going well, because the logic of administrative-political divisions is at odds with the requirements of integration.
It's even worse when it comes to planning and investing in accordance with the logic of a large, living agglomeration organism, not its artificially delineated parts. The deployment of social infrastructure does not keep pace with the transformation of space, and the logic of construction traffic is perceived in road investment plans with a long delay. The central cities do not try to negotiate with the neighboring municipalities, so as to link the issue of the development of new housing estates in suburban communities with the layout of the railroad lines and during rush hours, instead of traffic jams on the access roads, have "only" crowded stations and stops.
Finally, the otherwise correct idea of voluntary cooperation of municipalities in agglomeration projects - such as Integrated Territorial Investments - seems a poor response to the growing interdependence. As does the lack of models for cooperation between many cities with county rights and the surrounding "ring" counties. The way they legitimize their usefulness in the eyes of residents justifies conflictual and competitive behavior rather than the creation of permanent patterns of cooperation. The bonus for "getting along" with a big city is small compared to the recognition brought by "defending the interests of the residents" of a municipality.
Therefore, something must be done to radically change the rules of the game. Saying goodbye to the vision of the city as an administratively defined entity can therefore be the beginning of an extraordinary intellectual and political adventure. It will allow us to part with thinking of the city as a community clearly demarcated from neighboring communities-municipalities. Two strong anchors of the current system are relevant here: voting rights and tax obligations. The former should be balanced by creating mechanisms for democratically influencing policies with a metropolitan dimension. The latter - by allowing tax revenues to be shared in such a way as to mitigate the effects of urban sprawl. A more radical version would be to consider going down the road of reducing the number of municipalities and creating organisms closer to the functional areas of the city, with stronger internal units to compensate for the loss of separate entity status.
One could also try using the tools of weakening and strengthening certain levels of public affairs management, transferring certain tasks higher or lower in the hierarchy of local government entities. After all, it seems more and more obvious that people want to decide about certain issues in the narrowly defined place of their residence - in a given village (socio-district) or settlement (counted as a kilometer-two radius from home rather than a metropolitan district).
But all this should be done not in terms of creating new entities and delineating their boundaries, but rather in terms of introducing diverse and flexible funding mechanisms, consultations, arrangements between authorities at different levels. So far, we are doing poorly with this, inventing new divisions or levels of integration. We agonize over districts that are too large and argue over metropolitan boundaries. Although in creating them, we know that the scope of transportation systems will be different than the area of common climate or environmental policy.
We should get used to the fact that a city has many boundaries. Adapt all administrative, planning, financial and investment procedures to this new perception of "urbanity." And learn to understand it through the prism of movement, variability, rhythms of the day, through the prism of a "community of users" rather than a "community of residents." Unfasten from local government institutions the strong emphasis on representing interests and shift to organizing the entrusted space. So that different groups of users - those living in the neighborhood, those coming from peripheral settlements and suburban communities - are satisfied with care for their welfare.
The starting point is to blur administrative boundaries as a way of understanding urban space - a revolution in the map, in imagination, in language, and only then transferring this to legal regulations. At the same time, raising questions about the rights of residents at the micro level. About the division of this dimension into what can be legitimately particularistic and what should be defined by a broader perspective. The discussion of gated neighborhoods was a good starting point, but the issue of delineating more urban expressways on the one hand, and speed limits and other forms of slowing down on the other, will also become increasingly important. The city's internal divisions already follow different grids, and it is worth giving some of them a more communal dimension and identifying them not only as spaces for possible planning consultations, but also for positively understood local activity. With the right to formalized representation or at least "public advocacy."
The sphere of public action should set itself the goal of keeping up with urban change. Even if it requires work and money. The cost of change is rarely confronted with the cost of maintaining an inefficient system. Times are no longer so much "conservative" as outright "reactionary" in this regard. Most institutions live in self-indulgence, rarely borne out by the feelings of those around them. At best, they recognize problems, but insist that it is impossible to do otherwise. Instead of serving the purposes for which they were established, they become a social burden blocking the inherent ability of cities to accommodate and develop.
