Arts & International Affairs: Vol. 4, No. 2, Autumn 2019 | Page 8

EDITORIAL: COSMOPOLITANISM AND ITS BORDERS
Another challenge attends to the everyday cultural life of cities. I visited Wroclaw during
the summer of 2019. At a presentation from architect and urban planner Zbyszek
Maćków, he noted that a good city is like a scrambled egg, but you need to have good
ingredients scrambled together. The metaphor is not about cultural monumentalism but
suggestive of a syncretic cosmopolitanism. In this volume, one of Maćków article’s analyses
his housing development of Nowe Żerniki in Wroclaw. His words capture both the
tensions of the past and the challenges of the future. “The Nowe Żerniki housing estate
is not supposed to be a monument.” It is “a testing ground, a workshop or a process.” His
words about urban planning and architecture address the in-betweenness and overlaps
of cultural spaces: “We believe that the culture-shaping potential of architecture lies in
responding to questions posed by the present day and anticipating those of the future.
Meanwhile, beauty is not just empty forms whose contents are added by opportunism�
it is all that sometimes happens in between the buildings.”
Figure 1. JP Singh with the professor dwarf at the University of Wroclaw, July 2019.
There are over 400 different dwarfs in Wroclaw, commemorating the symbol of the
Polish anti-communist movement Orange Alternative, which started in Wroclaw in the
1980s.
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