Quality of life and public space in the processes of urban renewal—selected concepts and debate topics

Abstract

The aim of the article is to show the relationship between the aspirations to improve the quality of life and improve social relations and the undertakings serving the renovation of urban spaces. In the first part of the text—after formulating more general remarks about the social significance of space—a few of the concepts of town modernization implemented in the modern history of the developed world (Cerdá, Haussmann, Le Corbusier) are presented, while pointing out their most often ambivalent social results. Attention to the latter has been paid by, among others, critics of modernism and supporters of alternative visions (Jacobs, representatives of the new urbanism, advocates of the ideas of a socially cohesive or fair-shared city, etc.). As the national empirical illustration, the author then characterizes the case of urban and social changes taking place in the last two decades in the Powiśle district of Warsaw. Their effect, regardless of the general benefits of modernization and the desired and long-awaited approximation of the capital to the river, are also controversial, often critically evaluated gentrification processes.