[photopress:Warsaw.jpg,full,pp_image]

Throughout the world a growing number of historic inner cities is sealed off from everyday live as they are turned into open-air museums where buildings become part of the permanent collection and people are treated as visitors. The heritage value of cityscapes, the need for their conservation, an increasing dependency on the tourist industry and the loss of traditional sources of income force many of them to isolate, conserve and package their built heritage for mass consumption. Especially in Europe, the old continent, numerous cities are being fixed in time. Economic forces are slowly colonizing the social habitat, from Lisbon to Stockholm and from Krakow to Bath. These cities are neither booming nor shrinking, but are simply in a state of paralysis and try to turn their inertia into a unique selling point.

Today I visited the so-called Old Town in Warsaw. While crossing the main square and walking down crowded backstreets I had a first hand experience of the ’scripting’ of cities or what some critics tend to call ‘the museumization of public space’. Apart from the many characteristic facades I found myself surrounded by a plethora of commemorative plaques, monuments and other reminders of the tragic events that occured in this city more than sixty years ago. During World War II, after the courageous uprising of the besieged citizens, almost 80 percent of Warsaw was completely destroyed by the occupying forces of that time. But right after the war Poland’s capital arose from the ashes and many of the historic streets, buildings, and churches were restored to their original form. In 1980, Warsaw’s historic Old Town (that is, the copy of the original) was even added to UNESCO’s World Heritage list. This is highly remarkeable for a historic urban centre which is in fact only six decades old. And this youthfulness doesn’t bother tourists either, as the thousands of visitors per day clearly show.

The people of Warsaw can only be admired for the determination and will-power that was needed to rebuild an entire city and one can easily understand the fact that they converted almost every house into a shrine and gradually turned their city into an open air museum. However, after spending an afternoon amidst the numerous monuments and reconstructed buildings in this cobblestoned city I was once again reminded of Marshall McLuhan (”the message is the medium”) who predicted that ‘the city no longer (will) exists, except as a cultural ghost for tourists’.

Go to official website of the City of Warsaw
Go to UNESCO’s World Heritage List

Newsweek’s annual European museum tour reveals some thoughtful and often surprising spins on the news. If news headlines bolster cultural stereotypes, art breaks them down. That’s, in part, the aim of “Persia, 30 Centuries of Art and Culture,” at the Hermitage Amsterdam (through Sept. 15), the Dutch satellite of the venerable St. Petersburg museum. Similar surprises await those expecting to see the Gaza familiar from the news in a show at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva. The stutter-stop love affair between Europe and Russia is on display at the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow’s premier museum of Russian art. Other European shows also explore themes of cultural indentity.

Read full article (Newsweek International, June 4 2007 issue)