Ibid

EMPTY AGORA: �

HOUSING CONSTELLATIONS OF THE THIRD POLISH REPUBLIC

He looked around, about him, on the fence, at the well, at the guava tree, and everything, and it occurred to him that this compound had been part of him. He would live on from this moment like a living animal of the present whose tail is stretched permanently into the past. It was this thought that broke him the most, and which caused him to weep as Elochukwu, who would be handing over the keys of the house to the new owners, locked it all up.1

The dwelling – house or apartment – although undoubtedly separated from the surrounding space by a solid structure of walls and ceilings, goes beyond the original framework of physical shelter and serves a fundamental function in human life. As sociologist and city activist Joanna Erbel argues, our dwelling determines our initial situation, as it determines opportunities, or becomes a source of limitations.2 The way in which we manage to meet our housing needs determines other life strategies – it influences our decisions about taking up a job, starting a family, or pursuing education. It regulates the rhythm of everyday life, based on a specific routine of necessary habits and behaviours. It can become an eloquent element of self-creation or, on the contrary, an allegorical cage from which we strive to escape – a lesson that many of us learned the hard way during the pandemic. All the while, the material shell of the apartment is covered with a dense web of personal meanings and associations assigned thereto, memories of moments spent with loved ones, emotions we experienced. Despite the multidimensionality of the issue, Poles have become accustomed to considering it in terms imposed by the neoliberal dogma, which reduces housing to economic parameters, dictated not so much by the actual costs of shaping the housing environment, but by the imperative of profit. As a result, the selling price per square meter has become the most sacred indicator describing the home.

The fundamental metamorphosis of the Polish housing system has, of course, a transformational pedigree and is an expression of not only political and economic changes, but above all, of social changes. The modernity that was crystallizing in the 1990s in the West, which the Third Polish Republic was hastily trying to catch up with, was described by Zygmunt Bauman as liquid modernity. According to Bauman, the latter replaced the historic stage of early, “solid” capitalism, directly derived from the industrial revolution. Its symbols featured Fordist factory, bureaucracy, Panopticon, Big Brother, and finally, the Konzlager.3 This epoch was haunted by the dangerous spectre of totalitarianism, summarized in Orwell’s canonical 1984, and in Polish literature, for instance in Witkacy’s Sze11 EMPTY AGORA wcy [The Shoemakers] or Pożegnanie in a society tired of the People’s Republic and resulted in a wide-ranging “manifestation of long-suppressed individuality”.9 In this article, I will try to summarize the legacy of the transformational restructuring of Polish housing, classify its most important trends, and also show that housing and the debate about it as a particular, indispensable good may spark broader, positive changes, addressing further social stratification.

Jesieni [Farewell to Autumn]. Predominant fear concerned the defencelessness of an individual, melting into the homogeneous mass of society and losing autonomy in confrontation with a centralized political system. The emancipation of man from the reality filled with threats became a historic turning point; it opened the way to a new order, which to a greater or lesser extent began to be guided by Margaret Thatcher’s infamous maxim “There’s no such thing as society.” In the ethical and political discourse, utopian visions of a just society began to be displaced by new goals focused on the individual and his never-ending identity project. The modern condition of “continuous transgression” turned out not only to be devoid of faith in gaining control of the future – and thus a goal that would be worth striving for – but also lacking the support of a community of people heading in a similar direction. The fragmentary nature of the world and the indeterminacy of the individual resulted in anxiety, as well as loneliness in facing life challenges. Furthermore, Bauman concludes, individualization is not a choice but a human fate, and the independence or self-sufficiency of the individual is yet another illusion.4 Thus, freedom has a bitter aftertaste of appearances, because we did not choose the circumstances in which we are faced with our choices, and we probably have no influence upon those either.

What is truly disastrous for a good housing system, though, is not so much the existential dilemmas of individuals as the accompanying breakdown of the idea of community. The individual is the citizen’s worst enemy because the citizen “is a person inclined to seek his or her own welfare through the well-being of the city – while the individual tends to be lukewarm, sceptical or wary about ‘common cause’.”5 Bauman’s concerns are shared by the American philosopher and historian of ideas, Mark Lilla. The latter criticizes contemporary liberal politics for giving up inspiring people to actively transform society in favour of the passive, social construction of individuals: “In an age when we need to educate young people to think of themselves as citizens with duties toward each other, we encourage them instead to descend into the rabbit hole of the self.”6 The individual pulled into an identity project, out of sheer momentum ends up occupying a position in the culture war in which “what is being said is much less important than who wants to speak and for what reason”.7 Michał Markowski, literary critic and essayist, explains that the direct consequence of “aggression of opinions, emotions, and values” is progressing polarization, because the dividing line today runs in a horizontal, level relationship, between contradictory world views of voters, rather than vertically, bottom-up, that is, between society and those in power.8

When postmodernity reached Poland, a backward country in relation to the West, it fell on fertile ground

Privatization of profits, socialization of losses

At the root of contemporary living trends lies the transformational reshuffling of roles and values. Satisfying housing needs is now the responsibility of a modern – and therefore self-sufficient and independent – individual, rather than of the social policy by the state, as the latter gladly relinquishes control tools in this area. Inseparable from this phenomenon is the final ennoblement of private property, equated with security, and seen as a symbol of individual resourcefulness.

1 C. Obioma, Orchestra of Minorities, London:

Little, Brown, 2019 (e-book). 2 J. Erbel, Poza własnością. W stronę udanej polityki mieszkaniowej, Kraków: Wydawnictwo

Wysoki Zamek, 2020, p. 18. 3 Z. Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Cambridge and

Malden: Polity Press, 2000, pp. 25–26. 4 Ibid, p. 34. 5 Ibid, op. cit., p. 36. 6 M. Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal: After

Identity Politics, London: Hurst Publishers, 2018 (e-book). 7 M.P. Markowski, Wojny nowoczesnych plemion.

Spór o rzeczywistość w epoce populizmu,

Kraków: Karakter, 2019 (e-book). 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid.