Warsaw: Everyday Life as a European Social Imaginary

Abstract from the full article of the Warsaw - Pyzdry visit. 

Product of the imagination has been one of the significant contributors to the development of cities and its by-products. We shall begin with something of a schematic gesture for laying out some of the terms for everyday life in the context of today’s Warsaw – a city that has experienced series of wars under the control of the churches, monarchs, commonwealth union, the Nazi and the communist bloc of Soviet Union. From the observations, we have analyzed three areas where ‘everyday life’ and ‘modernity’ coalesce in dynamic ways – war (destruction), patriotism (rebuilding) and socio-cultural commodification (celebration).

We are living in an ever-changing world where technology and social pressures are increasingly dictating our way of life. With technology progressing faster than ever, and economic demand infiltrating our daily activities, we are forced to adapt to this way of life in order to keep up with our ever-changing world. Cities, at the same time, are experiencing changes as well. In the long term, we need to allow our cities to adapt and change with us. Otherwise, their inability to adapt and be flexible to our changing needs will cause them to become ruins, maybe together with its civilization.

From here, we are trying to see how art and architecture responded to the three conditions mentioned in order to survive these demands. First we need to study on the importance of the war events of World War I and World War II, its emergence as the socialist People’s Republic of Poland within the Eastern Bloc under the strong Soviet influence, and until the Revolutions of 1989. In other words, the first chapter will have wars, the rise and fall of regimes, social injustices, death camps, genocide, blanket bombings, concentration camps and so on as its background. These will bring us to what comes after it; discrimination, austerity, patriotism, rebuilding, reconstruction, celebration, and so on in the events of reshaping everyday life, and most importantly to ideas about everyday life. 

The full article will be published soon.