Navigating urban standstill

Abstract

This article is a response to Bob Catterall's call for urban studies ‘able to listen to, read and touch the sounds, sights and textures of the city’ (2004, 309) and a contribution to the debate on navigating urban space that has been recurring in CITY. I argue that an inclusion of places of urban standstill complements the analyses of navigating urban space that focus primarily on movement and that it allows for a more inclusive understanding of urban space in general. In his portrayals of urban life the Polish hip-hop artist Peja presents the most neglected streets of Jez˙yce, one of Poznań's inner-city neighbourhoods. His gaze pierces through backyards, gateways, and street corners, thus revealing an ‘other city’ behind the polished image of Poznań as communicated through municipal media and place marketing. The MC acknowledges the city caught in standstill and the people who inhabit the urban spaces behind the threshold of visibility. The sites of urban standstill dominating Peja's oeuvre are liminal not only because of their literal in-betweenness, but also because of their inherent potential for transition. An avid observer and chronicler of urban decay, social inequalities and paralyzing inertia, Peja holds unrelinquished faith in human endurance.

Key words:

• hip hop
• urban standstill
• Poznań
• post-socialist city
• navigating urban space

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the late Marshall Berman for his comments on an early draft of this paper and for his contagious appreciation of hip hop as an urban art form and social commentary. The author also thanks Rebecca Dolgoy, Filip Litewka, Anna Richter and the two anonymous reviewers for their inspiring comments, as well as Filip Antoni Malinowski who kindly agreed for the inclusion of his photos in this paper.

Notes

1 The post-1989 radical economic reforms in Poland—known widely as ‘shock therapy’ (see Klein 2007) and described as ‘transition to “normal” capitalism’ by their advocates (Sachs 1994, 268)—were engineered by the neo-liberal economist Leszek Balcerowicz with the help of Milton Friedman's disciple, Jeffrey Sachs. Although the reformers’ professed intention was an economic ‘return to Europe’—meaning, of course, Western Europe—the variant of neo-liberalism introduced in Poland has turned out to be much more ‘market-radical’ than the ‘embedded neoliberalism’ in the EU's Western states (Bohle 2006, 57).

2 For attempts by local authorities to brand and re-brand Poznań, see, for example, Mergler and Pobłocki (2010).

3 A successful military insurrection against Germany inspired by a patriotic speech given by Ignacy Paderewski in Poznań on 26 December 1918. Many streets and squares in Poznań have been named after the uprising, its crucial dates and its participants. The uprising anniversaries are elaborately celebrated in Poznań and Wielkopolska every December. In his song ‘Poznańczyk’ (2011c), written for the 90th anniversary of the uprising, Peja recounts some events of December 1918, calls himself a local patriot and compares the people of Poznań to Spartans.

4 All translations from Polish into English are mine; when translating Peja's rap, for the sake of my analysis, I focus on the meaning of the words rather than rhyme.

5 For an in-depth reading of chaos in post-1989 Polish cities, see Kusiak (2012).

6 For insightful analysis, see Berman (1982, 2010).

7 Unlike in US-American hip hop, in which descriptions of gun violence abound, the urban violence Peja raps about involves mostly fists, knives, bottles and the occasional baseball bat. This has to do with the fact that in Poland gun ownership is nowhere near as high as in the USA and that in Polish popular culture guns appear mostly in the context of local and international mafia—which is not a milieu Peja and his peers operate in.

8 David Simon's TV show preceding The Wire was the miniseries The Corner (2000).

9 The issue of evictions in Jeżyce has been widely discussed in local and national media, taken up by local activists, and poignantly addressed in Filip Antoni Malinowski's (2012) documentary Eksmisja (Resettlement).

Additional information

Agata A. Lisiak is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the TRANSFORmIG project at Humboldt University, Visiting Faculty at Bard College Berlin and, in 2013–14, Junior EURIAS Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.