A city which so often and so willingly emphasises its multicultural past and which has decided to change its centre should not separate these two issues. It is also a matter of modesty and not being arrogant about its importance. The fact that we are today's inhabitants of Łódź does not mean that from the perspective of history and development it is the best time for the city. We can easily imagine that certain people, who are not here with us for many reasons, could do more things and do them better than we can.

In Europe, architecture has served as a means of remembering for a long time. It has, as it is professionally called, the commemorative function. It has taken it over from sculpture, which for a long time had an exclusive license to commemorate – presenting history in public spaces, in urban space. Nowadays, many different institutions are established. They are defined as various types of museums which, modernised and enriched with new technologies that are meant to arouse and satisfy people's curiosity, compete for visitors’ attention with other attractive places and institutions on the global culture market. It is conceivable that the museums’ (especially local museums’) permanent teetering on the edge of noticeability in the information flow coming from the mass media results from the very nature of historical memory – it is impossible to collect common memory, manage it and make it accessible. The only thing we can do is enact its alleged presence by referring to emotions. Such a method has been chosen by many institutions founded to collect testimonies of the past, e.g. The Warsaw Rising Museum in Poland. The higher the number of people whom the memory should concern, the more difficult it is to identify with it. Our individual memories relating to our closest friends, family, local community and, finally, the nation are the most vivid and significant ones. It is hard to speak about common memory on a global scale. In the globalised world of common standards, it is memory that remains the differentiating factor, still more separating than unifying. Art museums belong to a different category, which usually functions better than history museums. Perhaps, it is so because art is regarded as an extratemporal celebrity rather than a memory carrier.



The aim of the project of the new Łódź centre near today's Łódź Fabryczna is not to commemorate the city's history with the use of architecture. We do not wish to build any monuments of cultures or nations that used to live in Łódź. Such a project would be doomed to failure. It would be enough to realise the ambiguity of the word ‘monument’. Cemeteries are the place for ‘monuments’. A place where there are many monuments will never be a lively place. Monuments, whatever our intentions are, always in the course of time become the origin of torpor, a centre of petrification, a sign of numbness. We can see that personally when we try to manoeuvre ourselves through the quickly growing collection of monuments erected on the desolate Piotrkowska Street. We do not wish to build this kind of space in the centre of the city. We do not want to resurrect the spirit of past cultures. With the use of architecture, in the most natural and reasonable way and in harmony with the character of the city, we want to recover the lost time. The essence of the project amounts to the City repeating the same activities which led to its development and which will have, as we hope, the same result.

Who said that cities cannot return to their little histories which have been interrupted by the Great History that has not been particularly fortunate in this part of Europe? In the last decade, the history of Łódź has been popularised in the form of the ‘dialogue of the four cultures’, originated by Witold Knychalski. There is no reason for changing it. Disputes concerning the historical adequateness of such a construction were already raised and solved a long time ago. Supporters of the so-called triad (Polish, Jewish and German culture) have already advanced arguments of its superiority over the quadrangle of cultures which has no strong historical grounds. In Europe, which is more and more immersed in the ‘multi culti’ melange, multiculturalism is seen as an advantage, an equivalent of richness. On the grey background of an almost homogeneous country, the idea of four nations is truly exotic. After all, from the point of view of architecture and town planning, a quadrangle seems to be the most obvious of all figures. We just need to turn abstraction into reality. Four cultures are an abstraction but four streets are a reality. Why wouldn't the city transform the memory of the four cultures into four streets? For town planning and sociology, a street is a culture, a vivid culture. A vivid culture is a good culture. And it is the advantage of this transformation. If only we could make a crossroads of Niemiecka (German) St., Ruska (Russian) St., Żydowska (Jewish) St. and, let's say, Łódzka or Polska (Polish) St. (how many dilemmas and discussions about which streets should be next to or cross each other!). Why should the City, as a host, not invite the representatives of these cultures to come back? Ask them (like in 1821, when in accordance with the regulations defined by the city, plans of a new settlement were drawn) to try one more time to come to Łódź again. The fundamental difference would be that this time the offer is not addressed exclusively to clothiers, and the above mentioned four streets are to become the skeleton of not a purely industrial settlement but of a cultural one. Taking into consideration the degree to which the gravity centre of economic life has been transferred from industrial production to services and, as it is called, cultural industry, such a decision appears to be just as pragmatic as the one that prompted the city's development in the 19th century. Why not make a multicultural ‘new Old Town’ that has never existed in Łódź? Along its streets, there would be buildings that are hard to define now. The basic condition would be to use the parcel chosen by the city authorities and build something that would be vivid and would function well in the everyday structure of a modern city. Additionally, it would have to increase the prestige of Łódź.    

In exchange for a perpetual license of the land, the settlers who came to Łódź in the 1820s were obliged to erect a house in accordance with the standard design prepared by the Counsellor Chairman of the Commission of the Mazowieckie Voivodship, otherwise they would lose the right to the land. Such a building usually housed a workshop which brought profit to its owner. This procedure, advantageous to both parties, seems to be so natural that there is no sense in changing anything but details. It may appear impossible to repeat it after two hundred years but after moving the Fabryczna station underground, Łódź will regain dozens of hectares of empty land in the very centre of the city. Such an intact piece of land is like a time machine of town planning. It allows for an almost literal repetition of the already verified recipe for the expansion of the City. When you manage something big, e.g. a community of 700 000 people, you need to avoid radical decisions. On the one hand, leaving development of the empty space only to the invisible hand of the market, which would lead to shopping malls filling up the space, would be an extreme choice.  On the other hand, no city can afford to reserve its centre exclusively for ceremonious, anniversary and festival celebrations. Such events, staged mostly for the needs of the mass media by crowds of enthusiastic volunteers and slightly confused guests, are important but they cannot be the main part of the city life. You can imagine this area by either referring to the concept of national pavilions at the Venice Biennale or to the district of embassies. The area of the four streets would be a kind of a special culture zone – the only culture zone among special economic zones. As opposed to the Biennale and the Festival of Dialogue of Four Cultures organised in Łódź, this place would perform such a function all the time and it would not be subordinate to any superior concept. Can this not work out? Of course it can, but I believe that there are high chances of repeating the factors that, according to a common agreement of historians, resulted in the rapid growth of the industrial city of Łódź. According to Stanisław Staszic, such rapid progress was a result of the city’s convenient location near the Włocławek-Piotrków Trybunalski route (which has not changed, fortunately) and ‘near a vast and high hill, where numerous springs spurt’. The confluence of these waters can be easily directed so that by almost every manufacturer's house, there can be a stream for his use.’ Today, when we are surrounded by ubiquitous sources of information, everyone knows that the responsibility of supporting civilisation has been passed from a manufacturer onto a consumer. And if the planned railway and road-building investments are completed, then, sooner or later, Łódź will regain its position, where there is not a confluence of rivers but a stream of people who can be so easily directed that there will surely be ‘manufactures’ willing to erect their ‘houses’ in the city. Therefore, the symbiosis between the undertakings of the City and the Railway is so significant for the whole project of the new centre. And for that reason, important elements of the project, like the Special Art Zone, should be regarded as factors that drive those streams of consumers. Their basic function is to be easily noticeable for everyone travelling from the east to the west or along the Włocławek-Piotrków Trybunalski route. It is only then that everyone can believe, just like Staszic did, that the location of the city is special because of many reasons and it is worth visiting, even if that means making some effort. In the contemporary world, a more and more important role is played not by international contacts but by the interregional, individual and local ones. If we take into consideration the rapidly increasing role and growing importance of ‘cultural diplomacy’, then we cannot be sure where in Poland the centre of the most significant ’embassies’ will be located in the next several dozens of years. This project will also make it possible for the City to have its own policy. Right now, it would be difficult to select procedures and mechanisms deciding about who should be invited to settle in the new centre of Łódź. Definitely, it would be naive to believe that the sheer Reason will manifest itself to the city hall, and that its representatives should be given the exclusive right to decide. It might be an important area of a political as well as cultural dispute, where conflicting structures, which need to function and confront each other in every living organism, would reveal themselves. Participation in making such decisions may be one of the most essential areas of the functioning of democracy within the city and, taking into consideration technological development, it may refer to all the inhabitants interested in this subject. We can assume that a certain kind of a commission might be necessary, and in this aspect, the project of the new centre is also a political and social project.

The decision who to invite should depend only on the City. The problems of making the right choices and finding the best partners of the project seem to be the fundamental factor related to accelerating the development of Łódź and making it more dynamic. They may be cultural institutions, celebrities, religious communities, artistic and sport groups, theatres, publishing houses, representatives of other cities, fairs, etc. (of course, restricting it to the four cultures which in the past lived in Łódź would be an unnecessary and idle historical purism). Certainly, we will not avoid making wrong, disappointing choices which will require revision, but revitalisation of a city cannot amount only to building up the free space, to accelerating and intensifying social processes in that space. There might be reasons to doubt whether Łódź – a subject   of minor importance in the world of cultural diplomacy – is able to invite any desirable guest at all. Well, the first settler came to the settlement in 1821, but after a month he moved to a different place. Two years had to pass before another person was willing to come here in June, 1823. The number of inhabitants didn’t reach 1004 until the year 1825 (in 1820, it was 767). Three years later, as many as 4273 people lived in Łódź. As opposed to a country, a city does not have to aim its activities at world powers. We do not need to strive for such prestigious and artistic installations and proofs of mutuality as the Patriot Rocket, which is supposed to act as a Shield protecting the Kobro Square. We can also assume that thanks to the success of our Boy from the Baluty District (Marcin Gortat) in NBA, an office of, for example,  equally mythologized Warsaw's Praga may be housed somewhere by the future Polska (Polish) or Łódzka St. The mechanism which shapes the attractiveness of the unexpected neighbourhood and the variety of colours of the street is the most essential factor.

Because of Władysław Reymont's Promised Land, Łódź has stagnated in the poky form of a city with the one and only Piotrkowska St. Even if all kinds of new bypasses, expressways, motorway junctions and a fast railway are built, the City will not become miraculously free from traffic jams. Łódź will not move ahead unless it builds the four new streets: Polska (Polish) or Łódzka, Niemiecka (German), Żydowska (Jewish) and Rosyjska (Russian) in such a way that they can become mythologized soon.  

If the City decides to implement this project, the first one of this kind in Poland, it will, in a symbolic – but at the same time the only possible and reasonable – way, solve the problem of regaining its lost identity. It will give Łódź (provided that the City invites proper guests) a unique quarter developing as if nothing had happened, against historical events. Instead of another more or less ’dead’ monument, Łódź would create quite a significant piece of alternative and better history, to which everyone and at any time (24 hours a day – it is the only natural way of being in contact with culture) could go and see it personally.

KRZYSZTOF CICHOŃ