(though perhaps not everyone will agree with this view) one life. The City experiences itself in many ways. Certain spatial arrangements – the roads, squares, and quarters marked out in Roman times – persist and continue to organise the City today, despite the fact that everything else – people, social systems, economic and political climates – has changed. But of course, in a given place and time, there is only that one single City.
That is how the City exists in itself, but it is only from one perspective – the second, equally important aspect concerns how the City exists for its residents. The area of the City which each of us uses is very small. No matter whether we live in a big city or small town, the space in which we exist is quite clearly defined. Of course, some of us are more active than others, but all of us are subject to certain restrictions – we cannot be in several places at the same time; moving around the city will take some time; our lives are often structured around a triangle of work or school, family, and fun, friends or shopping. Of course, we sometimes want to break the monotony of our journey and go to a district in which we have never been, but – let’s be honest – this is extremely rare. So if a City, and what we need to consume from it, can be so small – then are large cities in general unnecessary?
The fact that our needs in the City are limited is the primary cause of both its decay and the success of the disurbanising processes, and especially so-called urban sprawl and the emergence of suburbs stretching to tens of kilometers. Most of us dream of a house with a garden, most of us have to work (or in our youth, learn) and if we go shopping it is best combined with going to the cinema, bowling and drinking coffee with a friend. In this way, an operating scheme of a typical inhabitant of the American city is created (but also of the City of which most Europeans dream – please visit Dublin, Riga and the cities of East Germany). The fact is that European cities have a different structure, due primarily to historical reasons as well as economic conditions – not everyone can afford a house and not everyone wants to commute for hours. But let us return briefly to those tiny ‘subjective towns’ in which each of us live. What do they have in common? Common shops? Industries? Cinemas? This is a crucial moment – we are talking here not so much about urban space as we are about urban communities. About the Community which has disappeared. Indeed, what unites people living in one city? People who, in the classic Aristotelian sense, should create Polis? Is there any urban community in general? Or is there only political community?
A central public space – the archetypal agora, a place of honor – was the essence of a traditional City, but even if public spaces still exist in our cities, and even when creating new plazas, arcades and urban parks, their meaning is closely linked to commercialism or the health and welfare of residents. Public spaces in our cities today have no political, but merely commercial-entertainment significance. There was indeed – as I wrote in the previous chapter – an important international shift in political and economic climates, and Catherine Needham rightly speaks of the ‘Citizen-Consumer’ (with a decisive emphasis on ‘Consumer’). That is the key problem of modern cities – the disappearance of the political community. The collapse of public spaces and their replacement with commercial spaces, the disintegration of the urban structure and privatisation of its spaces are results, not causes. There was a complete dehiscence of the City space along with the political idea of the City.
Why is the disappearance of the political community crucial in understanding the crisis of the City? Because the lack of a political community is the lack of any community. As Jadwiga Staniszkis writes, “too big a withdrawal of the state may not only lead to ‘denationalisation’, but also ‘desocialisation’ (because people are beginning to see their ‘citizenship’ as irrelevant to their own fate).”16 What connects the City’s inhabitants? Shopping together in a suburban mall? The fact that we were all in a multiplex once? So what? The potential in this cinema or that shop to meet others? That’s clearly absurd
Rebuilding the local community, the community at district level, seemed to offer some hope for the disappearance of the political community from the City as a whole – however, even at this level the community disappears. Nothing unites people living side-by-side. Therefore, the subjective cities are first a political and social problem, only then a spatial one. The reintegration of urban space cannot be carried out with urban tools. Urbanism, as such, or land use planning are increasingly irrelevant, precisely because their role has become purely regulatory, instrumental and expert. One cannot save the cities through interventions and social programs either – it is still too little; these are only half measures. The only effective remedy would be to reclaim the City as a political idea, as a self-governing organism. Not planning, not social programs, but politics is the path of salvation for cities.
Strangers in the City
Immigrants as Attraction, Immigrants as Menace
The issues concerning immigration and multiethnicity are extremely broad. In addition to these is the problem of ‘other Others’ in the City. The different groups in the City, though they have a great joint role, also have a lot of overlap. ‘Strangers’ in the city are not necessarily immigrants – for instance, strangers in the city of a conservative society can be homosexuals, who after all come from within that same society, while immigrants under certain conditions (for example, in the cities where immigrants make up the majority) are not necessarily ‘strangers’. For an even better rendering of the complexity of this problem, there should be a distinction between the several types of immigrant presence in the world. Probably the simplest classification is a division into those who, with their own will or against it, stay in a ‘foreign’ city permanently, and those who are in such a city ‘temporarily’, where that period of time, though it may last for several years, is in fact – at least in the declarations of immigrants – a minor interruption in their ‘proper’ life. This ‘temporary’ migration has one primary goal – economic. Its purpose is to allow the immigrant to earn enough money to start a ‘real’ life upon returning to their country.
These kinds of immigrants are very strongly associated with the country of their origin and very weakly with the country in which they are temporarily staying. Most do not know (or know very little of) the language of their host country, do not want or do not have too much capacity to integrate with a culturally alien environment, and perform the simplest and worst paid work (although, of course, we have here a unique group of highly specialised workers who are often a cosmopolitan community, familiar with the language of their host country and who feel just as ‘at home’ or just as ‘foreign’ as anywhere else in the world). Their importance to the host country is basically economic; because these people are doing work which the ‘locals’ do not wish to pursue, there is a kind of symbiosis. To their apparent mutual satisfaction, the immigrants work and the ‘locals’ use them. Poles were such immigrants for many years (and still some of my countrymen remain so), as were Turks in Germany, Hispanics in the U.S. or Vietnamese in Poland.
This category of immigrants rather smoothly intertwines with another: the category of immigrants who were forced to leave their homes without being in any way prepared. I am talking about all kinds of political and economic refugees who, like those of the first category, are usually poorly educated, do the worst work, but do not have the possibility of returning to their home country. These two categories of people are, either actually or mentally, very strongly connected with their home countries and very poorly with their current country of residence. It is obvious that the image of the country held by its guest is different on the ‘outside’ – when dealing with family and friends – than on the ‘inside’. For family and friends that remained in the homeland, the country in which an immigrant is staying is almost a paradise, whereas the reality of the ‘inside’ is the complete opposite – it is mostly hell. On the other hand there are immigrants who confidently choose their ‘second homeland’ and often find relationships (marriage, partnerships or friendships) with the ‘locals’, who then in turn smoothly merge with a group of refugees who for various reasons do not want to have anything to do with their country of origin at all.
Since all these categories of immigrants and ‘foreigners’ are
