2010 Urban change : The prospect of transformation
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Item Open Access Concepts and issues of the european urban summer school in Wrocław(AESOP, 2010) Mironowicz, Izabela; Ryser, JudithUrbanisation is a global process, yet it has left a particular legacy in European cities which constituted the content of the 2010 UN-Habitat European Urban Summer School. Young professionals and tutors with diverse backgrounds congregated from all over Europe and beyond in a central European city to gain a better understanding of urban change. Reconciling heritage with development was the challenge to achieve a more sustainable urban future. ‘Sustainability’ was conceived here as a balance between historic legacy, regeneration and citywide urban transformation. Wrocław, the host city generously provided the empirical setting to test these assumptions, to verify their validity through international comparisons, and to offer young professionals the opportunity to elaborate interventiItem Open Access Introduction : Downtown Southern Route (DSR)(AESOP, 2010) Mironowicz, Izabela; Ryser, JudithThe City of Wrocław has been facing heavy traffic problems, especially in the inner city and on the inner city ring. Not only it is a problem of everyday commuting, but also for transit that uses the downtown street system. Therefore, the municipality planned to build a southern downtown ring that connects Plac Społeczny in the east to the new development area in the west. This road is believed to change the existing situation, to release the city centre from transit traffic, and to reduce congestion and pollution in the old town. The current proposal for the Downtown Southern Route (DSR) consists of a high-capacity six-eight lane ring road, which will be made up from existing and readapted streets, as well as completely new road connections. The proposed route is to run south of the Old Town, connecting Kazimierza Pułaskiego with Poznańska and thereby creating a high-capacity on the edge of the inner city. It is important to note that the proposed planning area is one of the most congested in the city where traffic flows at an average speed 20-30 km/h and are often interrupted.Item Open Access Introduction Inner City ring road (WZ) transformation(AESOP, 2010) Mironowicz, Izabela; Ryser, JudithThe ‘Trasa WZ’ (the East-West road) is the first inner ring enabling cars to avoid the city. It is located on the medieval moat, which was filled in during the second half of the 19th century. While the early 20th century plans for the city development have already acknowledged the role of this road as a communication axis, it has taken its present shape between 1977 and 1991. In physical terms, the length of the WZ road is approximately 1,5 km. It has 7 traffic lights (5 concentrated on the first 350 m of its western part and then approx. every 500 m). It has 6 crossings, and 5 entry/exit points to the north and the south. It is a large road, with 2 or 3 lanes on both sides, two lines and a short road tunnel (next to Plac Dominikański) separated from the traffic. For pedestrians, there is an underground passage linking both sides of the Świdnicka street (which is the main historic north-south axis), together with two passages in its eastern part close to the Plac Dominikański.Item Open Access Past : The inherited city preservation or change? (Introduction to part I)(AESOP, 2010) Mironowicz, Izabela; Ryser, JudithCities may be conceived as heritage as a whole, including past and present dynamic change. However, more commonly heritage tends to relate to specific artefacts or quarters of the city to which different values are attributed over time. For example, the Royal Palace in Warsaw, entirely reconstructed after the Second World War, but according to the then understanding of ‘history’, acquired a new symbolic value of resistance while losing its function of seat of power held by the monarchy, and in modern Warsaw it constitutes a new determinant element of the city structure. Similarly, the Brandenburg Gate which was erected in 1791 in the west of Berlin’s fiscal excise wall containing the city’s extension in the 1730s played many different roles. During the Second World War the Nazis used the Gate as a party symbol. It constituted a border gate between the two parts of divided Berlin during the cold war and became a symbolic passage during the fall of the wall. Now heavily renovated it stands for the new status of Berlin as capital of united Germany.Item Open Access Preservation or change: Learning from the inherited city evaluation of part I past: The inherited city(AESOP, 2010) Mironowicz, Izabela; Ryser, JudithThe viewpoints of the City of Wrocław, together with those of UN Habitat, AESOP and the Wrocław University of Technology, as well as site visits, presentations by tutors and, most importantly, the work of young professionals on six selected sites contributed to the understanding of the ‘inherited city’, and animated the debate on the balance between heritage and development. Predictably, the findings were diverse but they established some common ground, if not of solutions then of pressing outstanding questions. Inevitably the original Athens Charter came under critique, but it was recognised that at the time modernism was built on needs of health, daylight, hygiene and safety, in reaction to bad urban conditions. Despite some post modern dissent and tutor inputs from many different standpoints, heritage was not discarded as redundant and was not considered to stand in the way of progress. Quite the reverse, in a turbulent world with massive migration and displaced people, uncertainty due to rapid change in the global economy and political landscapes, heritage had value and formed an important part of identities of cities and those who live in them.Item Open Access The role of heritage and future in urban change(AESOP, 2010) Mironowicz, Izabela; Ryser, JudithThe visits, tutor presentations and young planners projects were geared towards exploring what role regeneration and new developments were able to play respectively or in common in bringing about sustainable urban change to prepare the city of tomorrow for future generations. The focus on projects which were designed to generate structural change at intra-urban scale was a logical progression from planning physical and social transformation processes which would enable specific urban places to improve or reinvent their heritage value. There is obviously no neat separation between these two urban interventions and most examples presented, as well as student proposals combined these two urban development objectives. An unresolved issue was that of urban change. Some equated it to constant movement akin to the movement of particles in chaos theory, whilst others considered that the pace of urban change was neither as intense nor as rapid. Also they identified two types of change, either driven by natural organic processes mainly outside governance control, or by wilful political intervention, translated into strategies and operational programmes by the professionals of the built environment on the one hand and the development industry on the other hand. Both types of change did not take place all the time and in every part of the city and beyond. Quite the reverse. What did not change signified what was changing, gave it its meaning, its dynamic and its controversial character at times. Moreover, the political standpoint, the economic context varying from free market to social market economies and the position of the development industry, together with investment opportunities were in constant interplay, sometimes in harmony and sometimes in contradiction.Item Open Access Thinking at the megaregional scale : The cases of the Southern European diagonal and thames gateway(AESOP, 2010) Ryser, JudithThis contribution focuses on the regional context of spatial development. It argues that in a globalising world, spatial planning can no longer be undertaken in geographic isolation by solely focusing on a particular area, usually determined by administrative boundaries and political competences. Spatial planning needs to explore various scales simultaneously – others call them ‘layers’ in this book – identifying key issues at each level, discovering their interdependence and relating them to each other. This is particularly relevant for a city like Wrocław with its extremely turbulent history of spatial-political transformation and identity and changing relations with its surrounding regions and countries during its existence. and local authorities, often without an elected government and very limited competences. At a time when cities assume an increasingly important role in the local and global economy their regional position and influence matter at both national and international levels. ‘Shrinking’ space, owing to ever speedier means of communication, contributes to the importance of regional spatial strategies, not least for infrastructure investment. Beyond American planning traditions, the first mega-region was conceived in the 1960s for the north eastern coast of the USA where several supra-regional development strategies were implemented successfully. Since then nine other mega-regions were construed in the USA which are pursuing supra-regional policies to achieve economic prosperity. Together these policies led to the current proposal of a national strategic spatial plan for the USA as a whole (Knowledge creation and sharing planning workshops, 2004 & 2005).Item Open Access Urban change : The prospect of transformation(AESOP, 2010) Mironowicz, Izabela; Ryser, JudithThis book presents the outcome of the European Urban Summer School 2010 which was quite a complex event. We wanted to include both scientific outcomes reflected in the academic papers of the tutors and practical understanding emerging from the solutions proposed by the young planners. The latter had been working on particular tasks conceived by the organisers and described in the book, together with the overall idea of the school. The main concept of the book is to intertwine papers and case studies with the editors’ comments which slide like a snake through the book. Printed on the blue pages they are introducing each part, explaining the background and synthesising the presented material. The book begins with a brief description of the concept and issues of EUSS2010, followed by two presentations: the place (the City of Wrocław) and the teams of young planners who participated in the European Urban Summer School. The main body of the book is divided into three parts. The first part discusses the problem of heritage and its relation to development, the second focuses on transformation processes of cities and tools of intervention, and the third explores new form of the city. The three parts relate respectively to the past, present and future. The tutors’ profiles are presented after the final summary and the book finishes with acknowledgements and the team working on the European Urban Summer School in Wrocław. At the very end we allowed ourselves to present some thoughts for the future.Item Open Access Wrocław’s city structure(AESOP, 2010) Mironowicz, Izabela; Ryser, JudithWrocław, the capital of Lower Silesia, is the fourth largest city in Poland with 640.000 inhabitants estimated in 2004. It lies on the Odra River and four other small rivers (Bystrzyca, Oława, Ślęza, Widawa) connected with the Odra River in the city. Wrocław is an important industrial, transportation and communication centre for all Southern Poland. The city was partly destroyed at the end of World War II; it has been reconstructed and some of the damaged historical buildings have been restored. Situated strategically between Prague, Warsaw and Berlin, Wrocław has a well developed transportation infrastructure that connects the metropolis with the whole of the continent and beyond. A road network is running east-west and north-south, intersecting in Wrocław. The A4 motorway, running east from Dresden and Berlin through Wrocław, Opole, and Katowice, is the main artery of the region. An international airport is located just six kilometres from the city centre, offering regular flights to Warsaw, Frankfurt, Munich, Düsseldorf, as well as cargo services. Wrocław is also connected to the European system of waterways. The Odra links the city with the Baltic seaports of Szczecin while a network of canals and the Elbe provide access to Berlin and further to Western Europe.