Jazdów: an island of real-and-imagined sustainability

Abstract

AbstractTechnocracy, as a consensus-oriented mode of post-political urban governance, is a major obstacle to the search for progressive forms of urban life, including innovations in design for sustainable development. However, what is impossible through design activities fixated on material form of things in space becomes possible through what Edward Soja called Thirdspace. This paper presents the case of Jazdów—a small urban enclave in Warsaw, Poland—which has become a site of these types of unimaginable transformations and an experiment in progressive sustainable development. What began as a battle to save a few dozen tiny, wooden houses have turned into a long-term campaign for experimental urban ecologies, radical democracies, and alternative economies. Building mainly upon in-depth interviews with radical practitioners involved in transforming Jazdów, this study analyzes these particular sustainability achievements (across all the E’s of sustainable development: environment, equity, and economy) that had been considered impossible, and yet happened through Jazdów. Finally, through a discussion on the uniqueness of today’s Jazdów across the ontological trialectics of Thirdspace, this paper argues for the need to not only accept, but also affirm and nurture its characteristics of disorder (aspect of spatiality), uncertainty (aspect of historicality), and contention (aspect of sociality).