Heterotopijne wnętrza miasta i ich fragmenty. Przypadek poznańskiego nieużytku, Stadionu im. Edmunda Szyca
Heterotopijne wnętrza miasta i ich fragmenty. Przypadek poznańskiego nieużytku, Stadionu im. Edmunda Szyca

Summary/Abstract: Urban wastelands are the internal exteriors of the city. Ambivalently situated beyond the circuits of everyday functionality, they are relationally connected to the urban system from which they are mentally excluded. In this article, Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia is critically reconceptualised and mobilised to account for the creative, subversive potential of urban wastelands. By emphasising their relationality, processuality, and temporal stratification, the article strives to articulate the productive heterogeneity of temporary spaces which persist beyond the rigour dictated by the overdetermining force of capitalist urbanisation. The argument is developed through a case study of Edmund Szyc Stadium, an abandoned sports facility in the centre of Poznań. The complex history of the stadium is juxtaposed with its current material qualities. Appropriated as a forced labour camp during the occupation, the abandoned site is now a habitat of an emergent ecosystem, lacking material acknowledgment of its past. Colin McFarlane’s framework of fragment urbanism is adapted to account for the multiplicity of fragments and temporalities constituting the heterotopic character of the wasteland. The entanglements between material and non-material, human and more-than-human, as well as absent and present fragments of the abandoned stadium are conceived as existing in a productive tension, charged with the potential to articulate a processual identity of place. The heterotopic alliances formed between these disparate fragments can undermine the prevailing politics of memory and the practices of capitalist urbanisation, serving as a base for developing new strategies of commemoration and practices of urban ecology.

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