Kraków: A Tale of One City...with Multiple Personalities

There are many ways to look at a city, of course. The easiest one, perhaps, is to find a convenient spot or vantage point, with the city panorama right in front of you, and spend some time thinking what it is you see (and didn't see), stretching between the old and the new, the promising and the inadequate, beautiful and ugly, harmonious and misplaced, bold and boring, finally, between too much and not enough.

Quite naturally, the harder you look, the more you are likely to discover, going beyond the bias of your original expectations and in proportion to your factual understanding of what your eyes can actually see - from the links and connections spanning centuries of cultural and urban development, all the way to the inevitable contrasts (if not eyesores) of the modern age.

Pragmatically speaking...

Another one is to look into the data: the key facts and statistics, the number of universities, museums, hotels, restaurants, businesses, the overall institutional and business landscape, the many possible types of industries, flourishing or not. If 'yes', why? If 'not', what could be the best possible explanation? And then there is another, broad, but especially interesting category, however, with much less 'tangibility' to it. And yet it makes all the difference: the city's atmosphere, its genius loci, i.e. a unique combination of factors, characteristics and distinguishing features that make it truly stand out from the crowd, whether in positive, negative or otherwise thought-provoking ways. Cities can be so wonderfully complex in their "evolutionary psychology", that no simple categorization can do them justice.

Much depends on your perspective (as always)

Here's another photo taken only a few days ago from the top of one of Kraków's most iconic scenic points, the city's 200-years-old Kościuszko Mound. Take a closer look at this photo and see how much you can infer from this mishmash of an architectural composition. See what the contrasts and the similarities are telling you about Kraków, before I tell you that your impressions are bound to fall into the "regrettably biased" category, if you are to rely on this image alone for your judgments and first impressions.

In this particular case, the main source of your bias could be attributed to the so-called parallax effect visible in the photo. It was taken with a powerful telezoom camera, therefore, in reality, the church in the middle, for example, is about 2 kilometres away from the office building behind it, and the office building is over 5 kilometres away from the camera I took this photo with.

In case you still find it a little challenging to trust a rare 'law of optics', like the parallax in question, here's another photo taken from the same spot:

Fortunately, even the pre-1989 socialist regime of old was smart enough not to build a power plant right next to the Wawel Royal Castle (didn't prevent them from building one of the biggest steelworks and a 'socialist city' nearby). Be not surprised, therefore, if the power plant in question is nowhere to be found as you walk about the entire Old Town area ;)

So what is YOUR favourite bias?

Whether we like it or not, we are prone to all kinds of (cognitive) biases, also when it comes to exploring and understanding cities. This is as true for cities we go to for the first time as the ones we have lived in for decades. As a rule, the above can be explained by the fact that we tend to look at even the most complex phenomena through the prism of what matters to us most on a personal level. And so, a tourist, travelling hundreds (if not thousands) of miles to spend a weekend in a particular city will typically have a list of things to see and explore ready, well in advance, along with yet another list, albeit a little more subliminal, that of expectations. Similarly, a business investor coming to a city like Kraków will follow his or her typical checklist of items to review on a priority basis. A due diligence of sorts, if you like.

By analogy, a social activist with a strong emotional attitude to a particular cause, area of city development, management or mismanagement, or quality-of-life characteristics, will likely also be affected (if not driven) by a specific mindset or agenda. Much depends, of course, on whether it is

• air quality,
• trends/failures of architecture design & planning,
• housing and conservation,
• public transport,
• cycling infrastructure,
• sustainable development goals

they are after, or all of the above, and more!

While there is nothing wrong with social activism as such (quite to the contrary in fact, the world would have become a completely unbearable place by now were it not for the positive impact and the invaluable contribution of those who care more than others and take it upon themselves to look beyond today and tomorrow, beyond the instinctive selfish interest), one of its peculiar biases is that it sometimes fails to take into account (deliberately or not) some of those consequences of their actions that tend to go far beyond their immediate goals and often prove to be far more persistent than intended, ironically enough.

Facts vs. Perceptions

Imagine you are a social activist yourself and, having endured decades of public ignorance and general neglect, you want the air quality in your city to improve dramatically, preferably overnight. In support of your perfectly logical claim, you believe very strongly that those in charge have not been doing enough for decades and you know your patience is running out. Your next step will likely derive form a simple conclusion that nothing will change unless you "push them harder" to finally do something about it.

And so, months later you're ready with a campaign to portray the city you live in as a particularly vicious little hell on Earth, and do so every day of the week, every week of the year, for several years, across multiple communication channels and platforms, with 'aggressive' visuals and catchy, deliberately oversaturated photos to support your narrative. You may eventually be blessed with a global outreach, once the generosity of social-media and web-browser algorithms share your perspective with a popular editor of a popular newspaper, magazine or tabloid, somewhere on the planet, the last of which is only likely to give the story an extra twist with a catchy headline or a bit more contrasty retouch of your original photo. And if this newspaper, magazine or tabloid predominantly talks to those who have never been to Kraków, live very far away or have limited knowledge of Poland in general, expect massive, multi-dimensional prejudice in return for your 'imbalanced' messaging. Years ago, I worked as be director public affairs at one of the biggest business associations in Poland. I remember very vividly a number of stories when a senior executive is recruited for a senior corporate role and in the final recruitment stage, the recruiter receives the resignation phone call 'because my wife read about your city in the press and said she would never bring our kids to a place with such a huge pollution and disastrous air quality'.

Nothing but the full truth

To push this perspective a little further: suppose you're right: a lot more should have been done a lot earlier but not enough people who should have cared and could have done something about it actually did. To make matters worse, in the next step, you will inevitably realize the problem is not yours or your city's alone: it's the country, the mindset (of old), the society at large, who, despite all of the scientific research at hand, still finds it hard to believe there really is a link between longevity and the air you breathe, not to mention a very long list of diseases or the public costs of treatment attached. After all, most of us remember the time when air quality in Poland was much worse...and nobody cared, right? Few even noticed. It doesn't take a PhD in psychology to realize too many of us can be disappointingly reluctant to trust even some of the most pertinent cause-and-effect scenarios, unless they can see or experience the consequences with their own eyes, in their own lives, now!

A philosophical twist

Take something as common and omnipresent as death, for example. We all know we will die one day. Even the most devout and delusional of us will be hard pressed to deny it. And yet, few of us live as if this awareness really meant something in our everyday lives. Put all the blame on your self-preservation instincts, if you like, the very same that keep resetting your brain to the positive-thinking mode (aka overlook and ignore!), every time you feel you really need it. Suppose all of us knew the exact day we are meant to die. Would it change anything in our perspective, our values, our daily habits?

Speaking of vantage points

Here's the view from behind the very same Wawel Royal Castle you can see in the photos above. It does tell a very different story, doesn't it? A much more flattering one, no doubt.

A city with a self-perception complex

There's no denying Kraków has a long list of reasons to feel proud of itself, especially if you take the time when the city was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List (1978) as reference. Kraków is the very first UNESCO World Heritage List inscription, by the way, along with Quito in Ecuador. Back then, this marvel of historical architecture and cultural heritage was on the brink of an environmental catastrophe. The city's most iconic historical buildings and sites were not in the best of shapes, either. Also, the nearby Lenin Steelworks in Nowa Huta, some of the biggest in Europe, employed nearly 40,000 people and the city's air was next to unbreathable by today's standards. To make matters worse, Kraków's residents used coal (and just about everything else) to heat their old, poorly insulated and generally dilapidated tenement houses.

Air-quality awareness and education renaissance

Two years ago, the city banned the use of coal and wood for all household heating systems within the city perimeter. In other words, you will literally not see any smoke in Kraków's chimneys today. This was not only a pioneering decision in Poland, but one that may have surprised even the activists themselves. Before the ban came into force, Kraków subsidized the replacement of thousands of outdated heaters. The city's public transport network is among the best in Central Europe, with a large number of electric and hybrid buses serving the needs of both residents and tourists, not to mention close to 100,000 people working for international brands in the global business-services sector alone (TOP 5 in Europe).

Towards a sustainable future

With aggressive growth come new types of challenges. While this is an entirely new (and very broad) topic in its own right, one simple conclusion applies, like with so much else: if you're not careful (let alone proactive) enough in addressing those challenges early on and if you fail to strengthen your strategic and budgetary resilience early on in the process, the number of risks attached to your long-term development vision and strategy (if you have any, that is) is only likely to grow.

Kraków is at a point in time where, assuming a truly ambitious vision is there to rely on, huge opportunities can be created for the city to flourish for generations to come and build a brand for itself internationally - the kind of brand that most of us would be proud to be part of, built around values, responsibility, openness and quality of life and underpinned by the city's key plans, aspirations, rules and guidelines. Having said that, Kraków is also facing some formidable risks, many of which are reflected in the very reasons why social activism continues to be so strong in this extraordinary city.

Last but not least...

Here's the photo of the magnificent 200-years-old Kościuszko Mound. Exploring its remarkable story from up close is reason enough to come to Kraków.