The past as part of a city's identity

Abstract

In his book entitled Społeczne wytwarzanie przestrzeni (The Social Production of Space), Bohdan Jałowiecki contends that “space is the permanent remembrance of a society, and hence what exists today is deeply entrenched in the more or less distant past”2 (Jałowiecki 2010: 13). Along the same lines, Jałowiecki recalls the idea of Fernand Braudel, who writes that “any city as a tight society with its crises, intervals and disasters […] must be placed and understood in the complex of its surrounding villages and the archipelagos of neighbouring cities […] and hence must be situated in a lively motion, which more or less delves into the past, sometimes even into the distant reaches of time” (Braudel 1971: 65, in Jałowiecki 2010: 13). The recollection of these wellknown thoughts by the two prominent humanists is intended to clearly indicate that the contemporary thinking about a city and the interpretations of the various aspects of urbanness cannot ignore the past (...).