Models of Urban Cultures

Abstract

The Żoliborz social experiment, however, took place with the active participation of ‘organic intellectuals’ (Antonio Gramsci). Hence, I describe the Żoliborz reformers with the help of modern categories, calling them activists or amateurs. It is important to show that urban lifestyles can only be created from the inside. This allowed me to exclude the category of external experts. In this chapter, I also present the knowledge transfer between society and academia on the example of sociologists such as Stanislaw Ossowski and Maria Ossowska, cooperative activists who not only shared their knowledge on the estate, but also produced and tested it there as if in a social laboratory. It cannot be said, however, that they were external experts—they lived on the estate and were members of the cooperative, subordinate to its management. Knowledge was transferred in two directions. Researchers and social reformers inspired the estate’s residents but also learned from them, verified the proposed solutions, constantly corrected the neighbourhood praxis and erred systematically just as they would in a real laboratory. The conditions, however, were not sterile: the point of the exercise was rather peripatetic experimentation and the sharing of knowledge.