Architect vs. Politician in the Game for Historic Urban Space: Six Models of Spatial Policy in Historic Areas

Abstract

Historic urban space, consisting of old towns and historic districts, is subject to a specific interplay between individual actors of the process of its planning. An architect, one of four major actors in the game for historic space, usually possesses a set of characteristic convictions, ideas, and values they believe in. There is a specific ideological profile of an architect as a creator, resulting from modernist revolution and greatly affecting the quality of architecture developed by them, especially when dealing with the problem of degraded space (e.g., as a result of warfare). On the other hand, a local politician (in the case of a city – an executive organ, i.e., a mayor or a president) does not always realize how much depends on their decisions shaping historic space in a particular model direction. Contemporary Polish law gives local authorities the ultimate power to create spatial policy in historic areas. In order to be able to act intentionally in the surrounding space, as well as to enter into a substantive dialogue with an architect, a local politician should possess certain models of shaping historic space – ready-to-use templates of political decisions. The main goal of this article is to present models of shaping historic urban space – conservation, restoration, modern creation, traditional creation, retroversion, and reconstruction – as well as to present an architect’s response to attempts at political implementations of each of these models.