The Contemporary Sustainable Neighbourhood: Cracow’s Wola Justowska district

Abstract

The environment is the little "Homeland”, which is defined by a neighborhood consisting of people and structures. The neighborhood is extended in time and space. The city of Cracow was chosen as a case study here. The contemporary environment in the Wola Justowska district is presented in the last examples of buildings designed by the author. Those contemporary structures are compared with historical houses in Cracow, which belong to the author’s family since the 19th century. The author analyses the influences of the period of the 19th century Austrian occupation, of a construction boom between the two World Wars, and of the Communist ban on design and construction in Cracow. In the paper's final remarks, the author notes that the design process and processes of shaping the environment look similar in the past century and today and that a contemporary neighborhood is shaped more by a cultural process than by design. Designing, building and endurance of a building form is a process that is shaped by culture and at the same time shapes the culture itself.