The candidates for the mayors of Kraków and Wałbrzych about the challenges facing the city and their vision for its development - election campaign ahead of the 2024 local elections in Poland

The COVID-19 pandemic was intended, as was often said in the first months of grappling with the pandemic crisis, to reevaluate understandings of progress, steering society toward more equal and sustainable paths of development. The crisis hit urban populations particularly hard, brutally exposing inequality, exclusion and unsustainable practices, so it was primarily in the cities that hopes for profound transformation were pinned. The pandemic was seen as an opportunity to change existing models of urbanity, so that cities would emerge from the crisis stronger, more resilient and more inclusive. That experience was the reason we undertook research on the “return to normalcy” - we formulated the main research question: How are urban practices evolving from/to emergency and “normal” mode?

In 2023, the pandemic state was officially revoked, but deferred consequences are still indicated. However, that crisis was compounded by others that are ongoing and whose end is still being weighed: the war in Ukraine (and now there is already talk of a hybrid war being waged in other countries), an environmental crisis, a crisis of democracy, and the increasing political translation of populist movements.

Through transdisciplinary and comparative case studies involving praxeology of urban everyday life (see Schatzki 2002), cultural scripts and speculative design in three Polish cities, we aim to answer the question of how a usable past and speculative fabulation for a (better) future (re)produce normal life after a radical disruption and under uncertainty.

We look at politics in cities as places where the impact of crises on everyday practices is most evident, and where an understanding of these crises can yield more than a mere case study (e.g., an understanding of why this or that change is possible; why some ideas don't take hold or don't work).

We include two Polish cities, Krakow and Walbrzych, in the analysis as case studies. Their past ("capital of Polish culture" vs. "post-German and multicultural city"), economic profiles and dynamics (coal economy and the economic crisis of the 1990s vs. cities of culture, services, tourism, and education), social structures related to these economic profiles, and geographic locations (east vs. west, proximity to borders) allow us to explore different models of change. These changes are embedded in everyday practices, which are not only routinely reproduced but also reorganized, adapted, and inspired by mediatized visions of the future, development strategies, and implemented urban policies.

The protocol concerns the works done within WP3. ZOOMING OUT focused on the mechanisms of teleoaffective regimes in the (re)production of urban practices. Through an analysis of various documents, artistic works, and political materials, we aim to explore how, in turbulent and uncertain conditions, social practices change. In WP3 we explore “social practices” as they are described (discursively produced) by the candidates for the mayors of Kraków and Wałbrzych when they say of the city (challenges facing the city, its development and future etc.) during the election campaign ahead of the 2024 local elections in Poland. An exploration of political and cultural narratives allow us to reconstruct the mechanisms of discursive reproduction or transformation towards urban “normality” by answering the questions:

1)               What visions of the city and urban policy are being created in post-pandemic Krakow and Walbrzych? Which ones are not being created (and are relevant from the point of view of the research conducted so far; see: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1745-5871.12622)?

2)               Has the opportunity presented by the pandemic been seized?

3)               What is supposed to be urban normalcy in the assumptions of urban policies proposed by local politicians and officials?

4)               What are the main characteristics and iterations of urban (Krakow, Wałbrzych) future in terms of everyday practices and their components (general understandings, teleoaffective structures, materialities/spatialities and temporalities)?