Game of the City Re Negotiated: the Polish Urban Re Generation Movement as an Emerging Actor in a Strategic Action Field
IntroductionSince 2008 we have observed the intensification of grassroots' neighborhood activism in a number of Polish major cities. The increased activism has gained energy with the popularization of the Lefebvre's ideas of the "right to the city" and "urban democracy" among the local urban activists and their organizations (Lefebvre 1967, Harvey 2012) At the same time urban grassroots activism became an important and visible part of the Polish civil society, while remaining strongly embedded in the specific context of big cities and the problems of their inhabitants (Domaradzka 2015a, Jacobsson 2015) Although the scale of social activity in Poland is still relatively low (according to Social Diagnosis data from 2003 2013 participation in voluntary organizations stagnated around 12 15% we can talk about slow but steady growth in the community involvement during the last decade (Czapinski and Panek 2013, Domaradzka 2015a) Also, as World Value Survey data shows, social activity at the local or neighborhood level has increased in Polish cities during the last ten years (Domaradzka 2015b) Even if this engagement remains local and often has a form of "bubbles of new" in the "sea of old" (Praszkier and Nowak 2011: 54) it can be seen as a sign of a growing willingness of residents to more actively engage in the future development of the city instead of remaining passive "consumers" of what the city offers (Domaradzka and Matysiak 2015).As we argue here, the synergy of all the mushrooming neighborhood activity resulted in an emergence of new organizational initiatives, forming the core of a broader new urban social movement, which quickly has become an important player in "the game of the city" or in other words an actor in the strategic action field of Polish urban policy.The article discusses both the genesis of the neighborhood movement in Polish cities and the context of its development, when, due to the weakening of the earlier welfare state structures, neither local nor central government seems to be able to satisfy the changing needs and interests of different social groups in the urban setting. In these circumstances, local civil society actors, like neighborhood associations and community groups, play an increasingly important role in between the retreating city administration and the recently expanding corporate actors. In this position, movement activists are able to participate in the negotiations of the future of the urban development by both symbolically and politically challenging certain features and consequences of the new, emerging urban landscape and its re drawn borders (see also Polanska and Piotrowski 2015; Polanska 2013; Mayer, Thorn and Thorn 2016).These actors contribute, firstly, by providing practical examples of what these groups consider better and more efficient solutions for local problems and, secondly, by developing and strengthening local democratic mechanisms at the city level. Therefore, we argue, these actors also function as the providers and powerhouses of new ideas, norms and models for how to shape the future of urban areas in Poland.For the sake of this paper, we focus on actors in a particular field of Polish urban policy, ones that we researched in detail using Warsaw and Poznan as case studies of grassroots' initiatives as well as the centers for national urban activist networks. We argue that changes in this particular field are emerging at least partly as a result of an earlier exogenous shock brought on by the shift from the earlier communist regime to a more recent capitalistic paradigm in Poland as well as changes brought into play by European Union integration policies. Consequently, we show how the emergence of a new Polish urban movement can be interpreted as a sign of social transition in terms of values and collective behavior, some 25 years after the crumble of the Soviet bloc and the fall of the communist regime (see also Siemienska and Domaradzka 2016, Domaradzka 2015a)