The city’s or inhabitants’ space? Theoretical aspects of revitalisation of the Poznań district of Śródka

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to present revitalisation of Polish cities in a theoretical aspect (definitional, conceptual) in relation to a research project ‘The Result of 5-year Experience of a Pilot Process of Revitalisation at the Poznań district of Śródka’ carried out as an intercollegiate grant (Poznan University of Technology, Poznan University of Economics, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan) in 2010. The starting point was a question of the status of the space in the contemporary context and the value of the temporal perspective as a link between the popular and the scientific perspective of understanding the social actions related to revitalisation. Emphasising the role of a psychosocial order allows to illustrate the tension between the multidimensional character of experiencing the space by its inhabitants and the expectation of unambiguous determinants governing the revitalisation actions performed by its navigators. The necessity of paying attention to those different ways of ‘thinking about revitalisation’ postulated in the paper is not only a direct reference to the question posed in its title, but also a ferment fruitful to formulating solutions for numerous problematical issues, that is those related to the evaluation of the revitalisation process.