4 steps in the sociological approximation to new realities
2013 David Due帽as i Cid Sociologist 路 Universitat Rovira i Virgili
The fears 1. Fear of the social context:
According to the information received before and during the residency in Praga, I must confess I was a little bit afraid. It is impossible to avoid the creation of the idea of the “average citizen” in Praga (and the sociologists are very keen to do it, even if we try further to fight against that classifications about “normality and abnormality”) as a violent, dangerous or even social misfit. The constant listening of messages like “it won’t be as in Tarragona or Rennes”, “be careful”, “don’t walk alone, especially at night / especially women”, little by little starts to create a dangerous but, at the same time, exciting image about what could we find in Warszawa, and how can you cope with that. That impression gets reinforced in an informal speech in the plane with the girl traveling next to me. After having party days in Barcelona, she was really surprized that I was going to work in Praga and wanted to know why and for what, and, when her opinion was asked, “It’s not that I want to have bad words for them, but… (typical way of starting a sentence with a politically incorrect content) I would recommend you to take some precautions… you know… the wallet or valuable objects, especially at night”.
Those type of comments or stereotypes are constant in our societies, going to top to down and vice versa. Therefore a sociologist must take them as the basis against what to fight to, in order to try to understand the reality beyond, and normally answer to the common social principle of I just repeat the common knowledge, but I invest no time in wondering whether
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this is real or not. So it is sociologically and scientifically relevant to try to unveil that reality. This side, obviously, was the exciting part of it. The dangerous one was that those comments were coming also by those who really are in touch with the reality, such as the pedagogues. Those conditions, then, put on the table some challenges to try to overcome, in order to produce something interesting and not to fall on the easy stigmatization that we want to challenge with that project. Being able to keep distance from that general knowledge turns even more necessary that in the previous residencies, as it seems that the discourse is much more fixed to Praga’s reality rather than to Tarragona’s or Rennes’ ones.
2. Fear of the linguistic context:
The second worry I want to state, even if I consider it as the most important for me, is linked with the language. Whether we want it or not, sociologists use the speech as their basic working tool, and the fact of not being able to use it properly made me feel, at least, anxious and scared. In my first residency in Tarragona it was really easy for me to reach the people, because of my knowledge about my city and my languages. In Rennes, it turned more difficult as my limited French didn’t allowed me to arrive as deep as I wanted in my interviews. In Praga, my absolute lack of knowledge of Polish puts me in a really difficult position as a sociologist : what can you do without being able to speak ? On the other hand, my spot of light was the hope in the experience acquired in the previous residencies as a help to try to overcome that difficulty. With this lack of linguistic expectancies, my ineptitude to develop linguistic interactions was generating an important preoccupation about what I could really do in that context, moreover when remembering the problems that my colleagues had during their residencies abroad. Then, many doubts were coming to my mind. How can I learn something if I can’t talk? How can I understand without communication? Obviously, there are ways of approximation to the reality that do not involve constant communication. But the fear of not being able to interpret the reality and translate it into an academic language (that, finally, is what I’m used to do) worried me and was making me mistrusting on my possibilities. Otherwise, that state of mind helps to open your mind to new possibilities. Suddenly, you are keen to try to do different things in order to be understood and to break some lines that your normal professionalism wouldn’t let you do. I should add that having polish speakers in the group (educators, artists, researchers and, finally, colleagues) gives you some calm, knowing that, even if you can be lost in certain moments, there’s always some possibility to ask for the linguistic support or help to interpret something that you perceived, but you are not sure if it’s true or not. In that sense, you are the eyes, but they are the glasses, you perceive the reality and they can give you the final point to reach the comprehension.
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4 steps in the sociological approximation to new realities
3. Fear of the architectural context:
That title hides a third fear surrounding the role that the scenario can play over the perception about the reality. My previous expectancies about the poor and impoverished urban environment hide the risk to make miserable its content or, in other words, its inhabitants.
As a sociologist, that’s a risk to avoid. As professionals, we can work in difficult contexts using complex tools, but it would be an unforgivable mistake to attribute the content features with the container ones. One should try to understand the individuals by what they are, not what they seem or represent, and, according to that, it would be a big sociological failure to reproduce stereotypes without discussing them. In my case, my work is linked with trying to understand the impact of structures over individual life and, in the opposite way, to understand impacts of individual lives in the configuration of the social structures. For that, it seems obvious that one should keep an eye on the results or outcomes of collective life. The city center had been renewed while Praga no; this could be understood as a result of the different interests deposited on those areas or their different capacities to raise their needs and interests into the places where important decisions are taken. Probably, according to that, we could imagine a poor relational life, but one must try not to create realities with speculations, and not to hide rich realities with false perceptions.
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The strategy 1. Chained strategy for adults
To face the linguistic difficulties, I tried to develop a chained strategy for interviewing adults. I tried to find relevant speakers who could give me interesting information to understand the local reality, but also who could chain me to other inhabitants. As it is difficult to find people by myself due to my linguistic incompetence, I try to obtain the people by following the already met ones advice. Any thread should be streched to find the ball that allows the comprehension of what is going on in the neighbourhood ; any crevice should devine a door to open and to come inside to gossip. Even if I assume that this strategy can disturb the creation of a predefined sample and it can lead to analytical possibilities difficult to preview, it turns to be the most efficient way to find people to talk and it creates a new challenge when trying to build a meaningful discourse with unconnected lines. According to that, the casual meeting with a group of women in the podwórko at Szwedzka street leads to a patio analysis to understand the microreality hidden in that place. Another visit to the Praga’s Museum office leads to other interviews that were giving information about gentrification and relational reality.
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4 steps in the sociological approximation to new realities
2. Participant observation with kids
Not all the possible contexts of the neighbourhood can be treated in the same way as with adults. In the case of youngsters, the methodological constrictions imposed, with good criteria in my opinion, by the pedagogues, combined with the linguistic usurpation of my most valuable working tool, force me to try to create new working strategies. To confront to that situation, and after a process of epistemological reflexion, I decided to change my work habits to try to achieve the initial goal: understanding the socio-spatial occupation of Praga’s inhabitants. Then, which is the best way to understand how and when do they live? Trying to live where and how they live. The working process with youngsters has followed an action strategy rather than a discussion one, giving up the dialectics to look for the support of the experience, the observation and the fact of sharing their usual life. The fact of taking them to eat pizza, of spending time with them or of playing with them on their normal game can give you a great perspective of their interests that, probably, cannot be comparable to the information that could be obtained by asking and answering, this makes it easy to re-configure the discourses about what is correct or incorrect and to modify their reality to make it fit into the one they can think that others want to hear. In this way, playing to hide-and-seek drives you to some stairs that you would have never come into and to visit temporarily their daily reality. It allows you to discover abandoned buildings where you follow them to hide the team on the beams that lead to the roof and share some hidden places that they know as if it was the palm of their hand. Living that moments one can see how they sew their relations with other people and spaces and how the stigmatized neighborhood turns into a coexistence space. My silent company opens the door to see how they deal between their habits and the norms that regulate them, how they re-define their behaviour according to the space and people, how they come into the political correction when it is necessary, or what their economic strategies to deal with their reality are. I must confess that my language difficulties turned into a terribly gratifying experience, as, little by little, I found responses to questions that I did not asked and as it allows, thanks to the situational filter offered by the Polish colleagues, to build a discourse about the social footprint of the youngsters in the city.
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The reflexion 1. Podwórka
First of all, I analize the patios as spaces for socialization. Their undefined situation, on the half way between the public and the private space, had given the chance to many different situations through the recent history. Just to contextualize for the reader, the urban structure in old Praga is characterized by the fact that the buildings were built in square structures in which the central part was left empty and turned into patios with different entrances (Brama) where the neighbours could spend their time together or use that space for some common activities (for example, it’s very popular that each patio has some metal structure to put the rugs after cleaning them, even if they are more used by kids to play). Another specificity of Praga’s patios is the fact that there use to be a small chapel (kaplica) dedicated to Saint Marie that, little by little, are becoming cult objects for the tourists who want to discover “the real Warsaw”. Surrounding those kaplica we heard different stories, from their origin as a place to ask Saint Marie for protection during the war and to thank her that the bombs did not destroyed Praga area, to their origin as a result of their enclosure during the German occupation when the inhabitants could not go to church and made their own small praying spots or, the most extreme one, that they were built to thank Saint Marie for the expulsion of the Jewish people, who were managing the buildings in the area and asking for money for living there. There are some questions that fly over urban spaces, drawing a picture in which private and public spaces are easily misunderstood in time and space. Those doubts are clearly expressed on the Podwórka in Praga, where their status had changed many times from private to public spaces, leading to a lack of definition about their real status. Finally it just represents an expression of the changes occurred on private and public property during the communist time and further, that left some difficult-to-erase memories in the configuration of social reality. After some interviews in different patios in the neighbourhood, we stated different moments in their configuration. During the German occupation, the poles had been locked up in their patios not to allow them to walk freely in the city, and they were just opened in certain moments in the morning to go to the shops and, after that, they were closed again. One can imagine that, at that moment, the patios have had a key role in the social life, as many things were going on there because of the impossibility of leaving them. At the first moment of the soviet occupation, once the Germans left, the neighbours had broken the gates at the brama to get free from the patios and not to allow the soviets to close them again. That social fighting act returned the patios to their original status as public space.
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4 steps in the sociological approximation to new realities
Paradoxically, the fall of communism and the rise of the capitalist system lead the patios to a new redefinition, in which the new dynamics of the free market are changing its current status, with some kind of regression to the privatization of those spaces. On one hand, the gentrification process that is taking place in Praga area is leading to a price increase and a progressive exclusion of some of the old inhabitants of the area from some public spaces, moving them inside the patios again. Those neighbours do not find their own space in the “new” neighbourhood and are withdrawing from some streets or spaces that they do not consider to be theirs to hide again into the semiprivacy of the patio. On the other hand, the new buildings are done with different managing patterns, characterized by the reprivatisation of communitarian spaces, and by the fact that they are equiped with fences and security systems to protect themselves. It’s interesting to see how the symbolic enemy changed from being inside, and then we cannot let him leave, to be outside, and we should not let him get inside, and how the changes on the economical system lead to a redefinition of public and private space, being the private one the valuable and desirable, while the public one is not being worth anymore. It’s also interesting to see how in the old buildings (the ones that are not yet renovated), the neighbours renegociate tacitly the coexistence norms of the patios, at some places some things are allowed, while on others, they are not. It’s also sociologically pertinent to put attention on the “invisible wall” of the stigmas and stereotypes that do not allow foreigners to get inside some patios, turning them into unknown spaces where the public space turns into some kind of extension of the private one, probably making these invisible walls more powerful than the fences to avoid others.
2. The young ones
The youngsters represent the freedom inside the closeness of the neighbourhood. They seem to know all the places in Praga, they seem to be able to come into everywhere they want, protected by the umbrella of their generational status between childhood and adulthood. Their living proposal creates a new pattern of normality that probably breaks the general pattern in the city, helping them to be tagged as “difficult youngsters”. However, that presumed freedom must not hide the tacit limits that are imposed by the structural situation that they live. That counter-current freedom can be easily linked to the stigma that lies over Praga, as they can live under the social invisibility of the general ignorance, but they also need to breathe when they leave the foul air of their home difficulties. The complexity of individual situations is easily forgotten when they leave the brama and they start to play to hide and seek in any abandoned place, while they wait for the coming of the monster of capitalism to steal them that improvised park.
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Despite that, it is interesting to see how those “difficult youngsters” have interiorized the patterns of social functioning, how they are able to change their discourses according to the social space that they occupy or how they develop individual strategies for their economical survival. Behind every “difficult people” one can find a hidden difficulty for being young in their context. This discourse must not hide the difficult reality that, as a society, we must face with young people in difficult contexts. It seems obvious that youth is a complex period in which things change and youngsters are, in some way, fighting against the adult society as a way to find their place in it. The problem is that for some people there’s just one opportunity to do the things right, cause it turns really difficult to overcome some situations if you don’t have the tools or the help to do that, and finally that possibility is linked with inequality in the economical status and in the access to resources.
3. The gentrification process
Following in some way Berlin’s model, the urban evolution of Praga is leading to a gentrification process that is attracting people from other places to live there to feel the traditional way of living in a popular neighbourhood. The growth of Polish economy drives the neighbourhood to an urban regeneration process that has expected results : its social transformation. The people who have more economical difficulties suffer form pressure that, little by little, can lead to abandoning their flats and spaces for moving into new environments that, probably, will be linked to similar degradation patterns. But, on the other hand, one must assume the need of urban regeneration in the area to improve the living standards of their inhabitants and not to condemn them to live forever in such a downfallen condition and to promote their normalisation into the urban context. It had been an interesting topic to discuss with neighbours. I found some that are really scared about the rise of prices and their real future possibilities to continue living there. Some others felt in some way attacked by that idea, because the neighbourhood really needs an urban regeneration and they are just trying to continue living there (or camo to live there) because it’s the place they can afford or they like to be, but they do not want to feel guilty for something that is not on their hands. I put that topic on the table because it’s a representation of how structural changes have strong effects on individuals, and how they manage their private life to overcome those impacts. It’s really difficult to find who is the responsible for that, as social dynamics do not have a clear origin, even if they could have a foreseeable end. Then, we just have one situation in which the responsible persons are difficult to detect, but the victims are already known.
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4 steps in the sociological approximation to new realities
Another element that adds some difficulties to that situation is the irregular situation of property inherited from communism. The double occupation of Poland by German and Soviets introduced many changes in the property status, firstly by misappropriating the Jewish properties, later by nationalizing them. After the fall of communism, the Polish government promoted the restytucja, the restitution of properties to redress the injustices of the Nazi and Communist revolutions that ravaged the nation between 1939 and 19561. In practical terms, the restitution of some properties, solving a historical injustice, can generate new injustices according to the situation of those who live now on that places, can see how, in some occasions, the new owners of the buildings prefer to empty the building to restore it and turn it into a private property that can be sold after the process. The neighbours have some advantages when trying to buy their properties, but, in some occasions, it’s not enough to make them continue living there and they are finally expelled from their places. Of course, I assume it’s difficult to talk about a general process for expelling inhabitants, but, at least, it’s enough to pay attention to what is happening in Praga and the motives that lead to the social renovation. That process that drives Praga to its normalisation can also mean a kick outside the city for some people. The jungle laws that are on the basis of the market system harm the weakests, condemning them to new invisibility situations in new cities or countries, becoming cannon fodder for new difficulties or exploitations. On the other hand, for those who can endure the hit, the future can be clearer, as that renovation can open new economical opportunities that allow them to develop their life project. Finally, all the social patterns tend to be polyhedral : some must lose to allow others to win. The real difficulty lies then on the position that each individual occupy and which tools or skills they can use to change their situation. One just need a democratic distribution of those tools or skills, if it’s possible.
1
Chodakiewicz M., Radzilowski J, Tolczyk D., Poland’s Transformation : A Work in Progress (Charlottesville, VA : Leopolis Press, 2003), p. 157-193.
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The results Network of an old inhabitant having lived more than 40 years in Praga
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4 steps in the sociological approximation to new realities
Network of a young inhabitant having lived all his life in Praga
4 steps in the sociological approximation to new realities
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Network of a newcomer to Praga
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4 steps in the sociological approximation to new realities
Patios as a representation of closed relational structures
NO REPE
ETIR
PRAGA 2013