The revitalization of urban space

Dublin Core

Smagacz uses a comparative approach to look at two very different but related processes: what she calls the “revitalization” of two formerly peripheral and now prosper-
ous, innovative and trendy urban districts: the first a part of the historical Polish capital, Krakow, and the second of the dynamic Northern Italian city of Milan. Both are useful objects of analysis in Smagacz’s perspective, and comparison throws into high relief the differences as well as the similarities. For Smagacz cities are important from a methodological point of view: not only are they of growing significance in today’s world, where an ever greater proportion of the population has become, willingly or not, urban: for Smagacz cities force us to integrate our disciplinary approaches and tools. The city cannot be understood unilaterally, but brings the researcher necessarily to look to different disciplines, or rather across and between disciplines, in order to create a meaningful and realistic picture.

Marta Smagacz is by formation a sociologist, and sociological concerns were the starting point for her study. Her methodology is based on the conviction that the city and its parts are made, interpreted and continually reinterpreted by the inhabitants as they construct and reconstruct ‘their’ city. Interviews with the present inhabitants of the two districts form the core of her empirical evidence. The object of study and the results obtained inspired Smagacz to bring a historical and political-cultural perspective to bear on Ticinese and Kazimierz, in the attempt to highlight and to explain their similarities and differences.