culburb urban acupunture

Culburb: Urban Acupuncture for Ursus
international call for urban interventions in Ursus district of Warsaw – organizer’s design
Ursus Niedźwiadek – The Third Way
Tomasz Berezowski, Piotr Bujas, Bartłomiej Nawrocki

background
The project proposes a long-term perspective changes Niedźwiadek housing estate in Ursus by applied experiment. The proposal balances between local sitopia and open project. Sitopia is here associated with utopia possible to implement in a particular place. Also refers to a specific, narrower use of the term by Carolyn Steel (Hungry City). It combines the Greek word sitos (food, natural products) with utopia. For Steel sitopia is a state achievable by changing the routines of everyday life, affecting the perception of the limits of what is possible for the individual and the community. It should also be noted that the immediate cause of 1976 protests in Ursus, was the announcement of an increase in food prices. In 2012, there is a global protest movement as response to a similar problems.

area of experiment
Niedźwiadek Housing Estate was erected between 1968-78 as a residential development for Ursus Machanical Works. It is the largest and most homogeneous estate in the district and it was the biggest social investment in the history of Ursus. As a main part of the intensive urban development of north part of the district above railways Niedźwiadek is located close to the Mechanical Works where the New City of Ursus is planned (described as a first polish smart city). At the same time this neighbourhood represents a full spectrum of the main problems of the district. There is a largest group of professionally inactive people. Together with Old Ursus it is inhabited by an ageing population but at the same time has a highest level of migration (both incoming and outgoing). A relatively high number of available apartments with low rents as well as good public transport connections with Warsaw city centre reinforce its “bedroom for newcomers” image in Warsaw. Niedźwiadek housing has also the least developed green areas in a district and has been indicated in the Ursus Revitalisation Microprogram as one of the places with most urgent interventions necessary.

place as design. chronology
The basis of the proposal is an analysis of the former modernization projects of the site. All of them remained uncompleted. Successive plans being only as an outcome of political decisions were only overwriting the precedent states. Their layers and elements, more or less visible today, are superimposed and reflected in the current structure of this district. Chronologically, they were as follow:

1. Foundation of a colony of suburban houses in Gołąbki village, owned by prominent families of Grabski, Wojciechowski and others. Then development of a ‘peasant’ agricultural structure with adjacent greenhouses and gardens (1919-1939),
2. Niedźwiadek housing estate – factory housing of Ursus Mechanical Works – located on the
nationalized private properties. Post-war modern functional plan of the development with two settlement zones and never executed central belt of greenery and services (1968-78).
3. subdivision of eastern part of the green belt into a dense residential developments (1992-2002).

The main urban visions for Ursus assume development of residential areas with own services – a post-industrial New City of Ursus, and/or alternatively  – reindustrialisation of the former Ursus factory. Without any final conclusions related to the future transformations of this industrial area it is important that the Niedźwiadek housing estate is not included in any new revitalisation perspectives, neither spatial nor involving any of different social groups currently living there. Thus the housing estate remains as a suburban pole of the district with its own chronology and list of problems. Besides already mentioned conflicts and negotiations of the future dictrict’s centre we propose a Third Way. This title label/name can be understood literally – as a third option associated with classical concepts as Third Way of A. and H. Toffler or as escape from an  alternative of opposing terms such as consumption and production, activity and exclusion etc.

scheme for design chronology of housing estate

	5. Third Way Niedźwiadek housing estate – gardens and farmlands in common spaces (E2:20??)
	4. “field of action”  – experiment – change of use of one of the in-between buildings spaces (E1:2012)
	3. development of eastern part of the green belt into a dense urban structure – second subdivision (1992-2002)
	2. Niedźwiadek housing estate –  factory housing of Ursus Mechanical Works (1968-1978)
	1. colony of suburban houses in Gołąbki village – first subdivision (1919-1939)

Proposed intervention is divided into two stages – practical and theoretical:

E1:
urban experiment with working title “field of action” which can take place in one of the in-between buildings space of the housing estate. The common space becomes here a place of return to the agrarian use of land. It is not decided a priori how the space is going to be used by inhabitants. The design assumes that local people are enhanced to more active use of the semi private gardens and especially unused common green spaces. The proposed actions may refer to activities excluded from today’s city but more then one third of the local population are former rural residents. The initiative aims to create a field for negotiations between different social and age groups, new and long-time residents and finally between representatives of various groups of interests. The proposed field of negotiation has a chance to become a small scale laboratory model for the processes that happen on much larger scale (of neighbourhood, district, city)

E2:
an open, second phase of proposed local utopia is to restore the agrarian use of the common spaces in-between blocks of flat. This sitopia may be considered as a final phase of previous projects by an addition of a new but retrospective layer to the current context. The layer from the beginning of the local colonisation before the “second wave” – industrialisation. And on the social level the proposal assumes an expansion of participation and decision-making realm in order to perform a bottom-up processes that would create a local identity and enhance for taking responsibly for common space