Let Them Not Sell Cake - on urban town planning in Polska

The sight of boarded up shops has been a common one in most small cities and market towns in the UK over the last two years, but I present the photo on the left as evidence of a very Polish phenomenon in this respect. In our 5 year-old klatki there are a number of purpose built-retail units of the type in the photo. The shop on the left was a Bread and Cake shop. I went there once when I first arrived in Poland as I only wanted to get a roll and I asked the woman if the bread there was fresh. Oh yes, replies she, but I got home to discover it was tougher than frozen toffee and I never went again. 

 I felt sorry for the shop-owner because every day I passed the shop I could see it was completely empty of customers and as a result they'd stopped stocking the cakes and reduced the amount of bread so that the shelves were looking more and more threadbare. It was a shop you could only just about see because it was built into the accommodation block and hidden behind a low wall. Access was only via a lengthy disabled persons ramp.

 After six months I walked past to find the Bread n Cake shop was no more. 

I feel sorry for the owners of these almost invisible shops, sitting alone all day and counting the bills. I know location is everything, and perhaps it’s their fault for not properly considering starting a business there but in my opinion the area would have been better served by building a separate retail unit distinct from the accommodation and allowing for conversion of the units depending on the services provided (the local delikatesy which does thrive, to be fair, is far too small, meanwhile the hairdressers next door sits idle because you can’t merge the two). 

A few weeks later and the Bread and Cake shop is now yet another women’s grooming service called Night and Day. As if Warsaw needed more of those! 

All around me the pace of change and the number of new shiny, gleaming buildings popping up is remarkable (when I recently spent a week in America I don’t think I saw a single roadworks or construction site) and I know Warsaw has a need to provide low-cost and affordable housing, but I do wish it could be done in a way that also thinks more logically about the kind of services its inhabitants require. 

It sometimes seems that the Warsaw that town planners and architects are now realising is one in which people are forced to drive to shops just to get the kind of items that they’d previously have nipped round the corner for. It feels like Warsaw is slowly but surely turning into a clone of middle-America with clogged roads and empty streets, sky scrapers and out of town shopping malls.

Gated communities foster gated mindsets.

(I know this point rather ignores the fact that post-war communist Poland built just as many tower blocks, wide roads and bad pavements, but that hardly allows Poland to make the same mistake twice.)