Abstract
Since the collapse of state socialism in 1989, the transformation processes of Poland in the fields of economy and politics have been characterized by a clear ‘turn to the market’, deregulation, decentralization and withdrawal of the state. The process, also called shock therapy, has moreover been quite rapid and dramatic, causing abrupt changes in the social structures and everyday practices of Poles. Tosics (2005) has listed the most important changes in urban development in post-socialist societies, and, although not using the term neoliberal, stresses the role of market forces, along with the diminished role of the public sector in development, being limited to ‘making private investment possible’ (2005, p. 60). The introduction of property rights was dramatic in these societies, as the majority of the population lived in state-owned housing before 1989, and the situation has shifted radically to what has been called 'nations of owner-occupiers’ (Dimitrovska-Andrews, 2005; Hirt, 2012; Lux, 2003). In her analysis of physical planning and regional and housing-policy practices, Dimitrovska-Andrews (2005) shows how they were characterized by ad-hoc decisions and tendencies to use economic tools as drivers of local development. In my own work (Polanska, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2014a), I have underlined the shortcomings of urban policy in Poland, running in parallel with quickly spreading processes of consumerism, competitiveness, pro-investment policies, individualization, privatization, gentrification, decline and gating in the urban sphere.
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- 1.
The analysis in this chapter is primarily based on 40 semi-structured interviews with squatters and tenant activists conducted in 2013 in Warsaw. Twenty of these were conducted with squatters and 20 with activists in the tenants’ movement, covering questions on: the respondents’ motives; experiences of activism within their specific social movement; the strategies, practices and relationships characterizing their movement environment; and their interpretations of changes over time. Moreover, secondary material, in the form of previous studies of the neoliberal character of Polish urban governance and the emergence and activity of urban social movements and other civil-society actors is used in the examination of the emergence and development of the two movements and their responses to neoliberalization processes. For more information, see Polanska, 2014b.
- 2.
Here the participation of the tenants’ movement in a demonstration against the eviction of a squat in 2012 in Warsaw (Elba) needs to be mentioned. The demonstration gathered 2000 participants, a number that in the Polish context, where tenants’ demonstrations usually gather between 100 to 300 participants and where the best-established and longest-lived squat has succeeded in gathering at most 1500 supporters when the squat was threatened by eviction in 2009, is a considerable, if not exceptional, number for a left-wing social movement.
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Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) at Södertörn University, the Baltic Sea Foundation (grant no. 2185/3.1.1/2014) and the Swedish Research Council (grant no. 2010-1706) for research funding. Special thanks to Zosia Hołubowska for her invaluable help with gathering the data for this study. Last but not least, many thanks to the editors of this book and all of the interviewed activists for the time and effort they put into this work.
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Polanska, D.V. (2016). Neoliberal Post-Socialist Urban Transformation and the Emergence of Urban Social Movements in Poland. In: Mayer, M., Thörn, C., Thörn, H. (eds) Urban Uprisings. Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50509-5_11
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