IN-PERSON London. Section B

Abstract

Włocławek is one of many shrinking middle-sized cities in Poland that has developed as a result of industrialization. Now it tries to cope with a sudden process of deindustrialization, the peripherisation of their status and deepening discourse of frustraton that residents have built. Local activists organizing cultural events, gathering around factories before, started to build new structures in the process of transition, replacing absent state and the market in this period. During this phase, the activists were filling the void left by the breaking of the previous system’s grid. Finally, after Poland’s accession to European Union the revitalization plan was approved. Culture and civil society created by local activists is one of the most important tool understood as a lever for local development. Although the revitalization is conducted with many investments in cultural sector, western, neoliberal model of revitalization and ideas of building the civil socijety paradoxically excluded previous local ways of organizing cultural life. The paper is the story about the role of local activists in different phases of the transition that middle-sized, mostly industrialized cities in Middle and East Europe have to pass – how they adopt global trends to local conditions and how they split the divisions between people inside the city and outside -betweeen peripheries and centers . The question is how to develop and change shrinking cities without imposing western grid of concepts and how to incorporate existing models of organizing cultural life in the new era. A case study of Włocławek shows problems of many post-industrial towns in Central and Eastern Europe as well as solutions possible to imply. It helped to point out barriers in growing civil society. It also shows a potential of local activists to diminish peripheries’ exclusion. The research was conducted as a case study. In-depth interviews as well as the participant observation was used as metho