The Urban Mentoring as a New Method of Participatory Urban Planning in Poland

Abstract

Twenty-five years after the return of democracy and the beginning of basing the country's economy on neoliberal developmental paradigm, Poland adopted the regulations regarding management of urban policy, which had been wait for over a decade (accession to the EU). The National Urban Policy as well as the Act on revitalization have defined, in a modern manner, the field of cooperation between the local government, the administration and the residents; the transition to the second stage of a democratic society – the residents as the co-hosts of the urban space. Slow evolution of this relation, heavily laden by the legacy of the previous system, in recent years has gained significant dynamics – urban activism in a country with a relatively weak tradition of urban culture, among the new generation (the new Polish townspeople) has become not so much as a fad, but a cultural trend, a philosophy of life. It seems, that the difficult dialogue between a city of community worker-activists and a city of engineer-professionals is one of the major fields of research on the Cognitive City in Poland. After decades of domination of technocratic relations within city management, which used to leave the shaping of the vision for a city's development in the hands of an inner circle of administration, a period of radical and fundamental criticism of professional (technical) knowledge has followed, turning into a nearly complete deification of the social side's full competence. Public debate, as an ideological dispute about neoliberal city planning by nature, has been growing under the slogans “the right to the city”.