Some months back (March 28th — it fell down the back of the couch) Polityka had a promising article on the encroachment of public space by private property (“Wspólnie nie dla wszystkich”). It would be naive to think that the Polish reader would find in such a magazine anything about Reclaim the Streets – they have a long way to go before they reach that stage. But even still, I expected better. You or I or any anarchist might suspect that capitalism is what lies behind the transfer of land from public to private hands. After all, the article itself talks of how “…ever more places are losing their public character: entrances, doormen and tickets are appearing.” (This goes also for national parks.) But not in Poland. The author, Pawel Wrabec, draws the conclusion that communism is to blame for this. It is a “sad legacy of the PRL [Polish People’s Republic]… a form of reaction against the restraints of the earlier political system,” in which the attitude was that what belonged to the state belonged to no one – and therefore was mistreated (“panstwowe, wiec niczyje”).
You can kind of see his point but it seems convenient to blame rapacious capitalism on communism.
Wroclaw, Wrabec writes, earns five million zloties a year from renting out public space to beer gardens and so on. Wrabec describes this “river of money” as a gold mine (literally, a “golden vein”). About 40 lines later Wrabec gives some context to the figure of 5 million zloties. 480 million zloties represents one quarter of Wroclaw’s income. So if the city were to keep its public spaces public it would mean foregoing .0029% of its budget. So not such a golden vein after all.