Chyba jesteśmy już z miasta
I think we’re from the city now

Summary/Abstract: Polish cities are currently undergoing a process of being “reclaimed” by their inhabitants. This urban revival seems not so much a form of recompensation for years of PRL rule over Poland’s cities, but rather a response to the effects of the political transformation on the city: the impact of the liberal economy on the elimination of spatial planning, the commercialization of urban space, and the growing belief in the sanctity of private property. In the midst of initiatives, discussions and publications that have stimulated the return of a humanitarian ethos to Polish cities and calls for them to be perceived as compact spaces that require plans for sustainable development, and the ability to read and skilfully guide the complicated grammar of city streets, squares and buildings, a Polish translation appeared of the book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jane Jacobs (1961). Although written more than half a century ago and focusing on New York, it anticipates today’s thinking about cities, distancing itself from traditionally understood urbanism (as the study of a grid of streets and squares), and proposes a holistic vision of them as a dynamic structure resulting from various “civilisational” processes, including some of an economic nature.

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