Between global and local: Polish city space during a time of transition

THERE is no need to convince anyone that political systems and ideology are major and decisive factors of space creation. Throughout history, the city has always been a material and spatial reflection of the social system that created it. The scope of this study is to illustrate how particular political and economic systems, predominating ideologies, and social mechanisms in the successive periods of postwar Polish history have affected the creation of urban space and the image of the city. Henri Lefebre, whose theory posits that space is created “socially,” perceives space as inseparable from the social relations therein. According to Lefebre, space is the subject of continuous transformation in time, an effect of the summation of past actions, where particular spatial arrangements are the products of political practices, social systems, divisions of labor, and methods of manufacturing. Manuel Castells