Where to look for a new order if not in cities? Cities are conducive to creating new visions and constructing utopias. They can serve this function as they are a space of exchange, of meeting various people, thinking patterns, readiness to open to that which is new. The core of cities viewed in this way is the public space, so it is no wonder that it is treated nowadays as a fundamental resource enabling to fight for inhabitants, attract investors and attention. The number of activities and the stream of funding allocated to public space demonstrate, at the same time, that it is today an endangered resource, degraded by de-urbanisation processes, negating the status of the city as an area of diversity and intensepresence. What is meant here are the processes of its fencing off, privatisation or clarification,that is creating public space suitable for one, specific category of people. More and moreoften it is justifiably said that public space ceases to be a common good, is exclusive as it is subject to the principles of commoditization, makes it more difficult to look for a new quality because being present in it is ever more often limited to a set of well-defined practices. We are aware that in a broader perspective such space is not very useful to us, that it loses the battle with the digital space, that it hinders looking for new paths which many of us, especially in the times of crisis, are insistently seeking. We are also aware that space regeneration cannot be carried out only as a top-down initiative.
We wish to go beyond the master plan in order to credit the development from the inhabitants’ energy, willingness and ingenuity. The space is to return to being communal and the inhabitants are to take new obligations of co-creating the urban substance, networking and creating the area capital as well as co-producing public utility services. The problem is that such forms of participation usually appeal to a small, relatively well-off community, while others still keep thinking that the space is fundamentally closed and its administration lies on the part of public authorities and other organisations which are above them. In such circumstances, not only the city understood primarily as an idea based on multiplicity, but also new utopias, which we apparently need so much, remain in the balance.There is no chance to create the new where the courage to experiment is failing. It is not without reason that looking for a new order remains today in the phase of discussions on the very need to search and the problems which make this task virtually impracticable. That is why this courage needs to be kindled. Interest and uncertainty become an indispensable project.
History provides many examples – the need for change is experienced best in an atmosphere of curiosity and interest in the world, and nothing kindles it better than diverse knowledge and street shows. It was the case when modernism was born and 25 years ago in the times of Poland’s political transformation. Not so long ago, we thought that the new, municipal objective of art festivals should lie in socialising, understood as creating organic neighbourhood, family and inter-generational bonds. But maybe today we need simplerelationships equally much, thanks to which it will be easier to undertake new responsibilities, open to new, surprising contexts, stop being afraid of strangers and otherness? Searching for the new has to be accompanied by a carnival which validates experiment, first attempts to look for other forms of presence in the city and of forging relationships with others. Like it used to, the carnival should become a public objective.
An objective which as exciting as it is committing. It means that we should not content ourselves with full squares and streets filling with people during a multicoloured city holiday. All that will be worth very little if people who tend to stay at home don’t find their place in the city space, if activities and rules governing it resemble those known from other areas of the city, if we don’t manage to manoeuvre city institutions into new obligations, requiring the negotiation of everyday relationships. After all, a carnival is a carnival not so much when it intensifies life, but rather when it reverses its rules. Only then can festivals also play their role of city-forming which does not consist in the fact that they are held in cities, but in the fact that they facilitate new ideological formation of the cities and the municipal character.