Travel /
Whats your favourite Polish city and why? [132]
Some people don't care too much about how things look
I was referring to the vast problem of industrial grime. And how to remove it.
On government buildings that were built of brick or stone, this is not a problem, and the taxpayer is held to account. But the mass of tenements and commercial facades dating from the 1800s is another matter. Most are rendered, and cleaning would likely rip that off. So it's a slow process unfortunately.
As for bombed out cities like Gdansk, and communist neglected cities such as the Silesian conurbation, that is going to take the couple of generations i was referring to, to deal with.
Other places such as Wroclaw and Krakow are alright on the surface, until you walk behind the facades and see the true extent of the problem. The burning of coal domestically, decaying infrastructure, vast tracts of property no longer fit for purpose, subsidence, high maintenance costs, ridiculous "preservation orders" on slums barely 100 years old so the tenants have no rights....
Disgusting city centre developments that are completely lacking in aesthetics - having learnt nothing from the disasters of inner city redevelopment mistakes in Britain (The 1968 Nottingham Victoria Centre - the UK's first inner city shopping mall)
The list of problems goes on and on. And central government does not have the budget to attack the problem in a thorough way, demolishing and restructuring inner cities, such as Britain did in the 1960s (criminally demolishing much of our Victorian architecture in the process) Very little of partitioned Poland's buildings were of the same architectural importance as the above however.
Let us not say the Polish cities are by definition all ugly per se - amazing chances have taken place. Mostly due to EU funding of course and private commerce (cue the nationalist contingent on this board....)
In conclusion, Poland's cities, if you get out of your Audi, and walk around and investigate, are *********.
