The de-communisation of public space began in Eastern Europe after the fall of communism in 1989. The first toppled were the statues of the key figures associated with the communist past. The monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the first Soviet secret police organisation, the Cheka, was demolished in Warsaw in 1989. The statue of Lenin was removed from Riga's Freedom Boulevard in 1991. In the same year, Budapest's statues of Marx and Engels disappeared from Jászai Mari Square. A renaming of streets followed. The list of banned street names included top politicians, revolutionaries and Red Army commanders, along with contentious events venerated by communist historiography. This was a remaking of public space typical of periods of regime change. It reflected new power relations and provided mechanisms for symbolic justice. It also played an essential role in affirming new notions of national histories and was a means of conducting symbolic warfare to legitimise ethnic divisions.Footnote 1
The process differed across the region, conditioned by national trajectories of transition and historical legacies. The universal characteristic of this process was its contested and protracted nature.Footnote 2 Given that, on the whole, the acceptance of regime change has been high in Eastern Europe, the protracted nature of the de-communisation of public space appears puzzling. What's more, over two decades after the fall of communism, some countries, such as Hungary, Ukraine, Poland, and more recently, the Baltic States, turned to legislative means to make the removal of Soviet-era monuments and street names mandatory.Footnote 3 The question then arises as to why the de-communisation process was so protracted. In this paper, I will examine the opposition to street renaming among urban residents almost thirty years after the collapse of communism in Poland. Accounting for this opposition provides a means of understanding the contentious issues surrounding symbolic change and transition processes in Eastern Europe.
Research to date on post-communist transition in Eastern Europe has recognised several factors that affected the process of de-commemoration. First, the process was hindered by the former communist parties, which retained a position of influence, especially in earlier years of transition.Footnote 4 There was also no consensus between different political groups that emerged after the fall of communism regarding the value system that should underpin the new commemorative practices. Palonen shows in her detailed study on changing street names and memorials in Budapest that the process of revising the city's symbolic urban landscape was marked by ongoing conflicts between various levels of administration and political groupings. These conflicts were not necessarily about what should be de-commemorated but what should be publicly commemorated.Footnote 5 Likewise, Ochman argues that disagreements among former Solidarity elites over transitional justice issues, such as how to deal with the former communist regime functionaries and secret agents, slowed down the de-communisation of public space in Poland.Footnote 6
The existing research has also examined how the historical legacies of the Second World War affected the official approaches to de-commemoration, especially in countries with significant Russian-speaking minorities like the Baltic States and Ukraine. Brüggemann and Kasekamp's study of the removal of Tallinn's Red Army monument in 2007 shows that the conflicts primarily centred around the Soviet liberation narrative and memories of the Nazi and Soviet occupations.Footnote 7 There is a debate, however, on the extent to which historical legacies continue to impact on the de-communisation processes. Kovalev, among others, argues that opposition to the 2015 de-communisation laws in Ukraine resulted from political actors pursuing their own present-day agendas rather than conflicts around interpretations of historical events and regional divisions within Ukraine.Footnote 8 Taken together, these findings provide valuable insight into the political and ideological resistance against de-commemoration efforts in post-communist societies.
What's less understood is the opposition of urban populations to the erasure of the material legacy of communist dictatorship. Existing research recognises the critical role played by nostalgia in attempts to come to terms with the communist past as well as disenchantment with the post-communist present experienced by many citizens of the region.Footnote 9 Post-communist nostalgia was prevalent in Eastern Europe in the 1990s and early 2000s and, as Nadkarni and Shevchenko argue, manifested itself in various nostalgic practices that were underpinned by generation-specific experiences of life under communism and also during the early transition period.Footnote 10 Quantitative studies conducted more recently in Romania and Ukraine have shown that three decades after the fall of communism, generational differences continued to matter, even if the specific attitudes to removing monuments or renaming streets in each country differed considerably.Footnote 11 Yet, little is known about why respondents continue to resist symbolic change.
Light and Young studied mundane, habitual practices that shaped everyday responses to street renaming in Bucharest. They argue that people often resisted toponymic change and used the original name due to habit rather than political opposition to new commemorative narratives.Footnote 12 Crețan and Matthews expanded on this research and advocated a better understanding of ‘everyday difficulties’ that lead to conflicts over the symbolic transformation of public space.Footnote 13 Using data collected from Timișoara in 2014, they argue that the city's residents and service workers were against the new commemorative street names mainly because of the financial and practical costs of renamings. At the root of this negative reception, according to Crețan and Matthews, were the earlier experiences of the Romanian economic transition. Lazarenko problematises the issue further by focusing on internally displaced people and showing how the renamings in Ukraine that followed the 2015 de-communisation law have led to the displaced people's sense of ‘placelessness and existential outsideness’.Footnote 14 She argues that these feelings were exacerbated by the ways in which the law was introduced and the choice of new names. As she puts it: ‘decommunization that was supposed to be de-ideologization of space, de facto turned out to be re-ideologization’.Footnote 15 However, despite frequent calls from scholars for more research, a systematic investigation of the wide-ranging and intersecting factors engendering resistance to symbolic change among urban residents is still lacking.Footnote 16 This paper attempts to address this gap. It discusses how urban residents understood and articulated their opposition to the de-communisation of public space and what discursive strategies they adopted to resist the change. It demonstrates that thirty years after the fall of communism in Poland, the top-down and mandatory renaming of commemorative street names did not sit well with a significant section of the urban population, who expected that the de-commemoration processes would reflect their views and priorities.
Research Approach and Sources
The paper investigates urban residents’ responses to the de-communisation of public space through the lens of the mandatory renaming of commemorative street names. Critical literature theorising the connections between the politics of memory and (de)commemoration and regime change informs the approach employed in this study.Footnote 17 Scholarship developed by urban and cultural geographers on toponomy (critical study of place naming) is the key tool used to explore everyday and routine responses to the remaking of public space.Footnote 18 The paper is also informed by the work developed by environmental psychologists and gerontologists and their multidisciplinary interest in a sense of place as well as ageing in place.Footnote 19 The primary evidence comes from responses to formal public consultations on street renaming conducted by Polish municipal authorities following the 2016 de-communisation law, which made the renaming of streets commemorating the communist regime mandatory. Most town councils tried to engage their electorate in the process of the implementation of the de-communisation law by conducting public consultations.Footnote 20 The existing legislation on local government gives the power to name a street to town councils and there is no duty on them to hold public consultations.Footnote 21 However, as acceptance for street renaming amongst those directly affected was low, many councils in Poland tried to increase the legitimacy of the process by holding formal consultations on new street names.Footnote 22 The paper uses content responses from consultations held by the municipal authorities of Warsaw, Łódź and Katowice, collated by the respective local government offices and published on their consultation websites. All content responses submitted to these consultations have been consulted: 118 responses from Warsaw, 477 responses from Łódź and 66 from Katowice.Footnote 23 The length of the responses varied, ranging from just one sentence to a half-page long statement. Textual analysis was employed to identify recurring themes. The three case studies and the quantitative results of the consultations will now be presented to provide context for the respondents’ comments, which will be analysed later in the paper.
Warsaw, a capital city with a population of nearly two million, conducted its consultation in June 2017. Targeting city residents, it asked whether, in their view, the twelve streets identified for renaming in the de-communisation process indeed commemorated people and events symbolising communism.Footnote 24 The consultation form asked whether the residents were in favour or against renaming these streets, asked for suggestions for new names and provided space for additional comments. 124 consultation forms were collected at five open meetings; 3,333 residents completed online forms and 605 paper forms.Footnote 25 Table 1 presents the quantitative results of the consultations.
Table 1. Respondents’ views on street renaming, Warsaw, 2017a
a See Urząd m. st. Warszawy, Raport z konsultacji społecznych zmian nazw 12 ulic w Warszawie, 10–12.
Łódź is the capital of Łódź province in central Poland, with a population of nearly 660,000. The consultation was conducted in January 2018 following the renaming of twenty-six streets and one square by the Łódź provincial governor.Footnote 26 The consultation form asked respondents whether they agreed or disagreed with the new street names. It also sought suggestions for alternative names to those the governor chose and provided space for additional comments. The consultations were open to all residents of the city of Łódź. They were conducted in two open meetings, an online consultation, a discussion forum and an internet voting app (the Vox Populi). The organisers received 3,366 consultation forms (89 paper forms and 3,277 completed online).Footnote 27 Table 2 presents the quantitative results of the consultations.
Table 2. Respondents’ views on street renaming, Łódź, 2018a
a Urząd Miasta Łodzi, Raport z konsultacji społecznych dotyczących zmian łódzkich ulic i placu Zwycięstwa, 2–9.
Katowice is the capital of the Silesian province in southern Poland, with a population of nearly 300,000. The public consultation, held in September 2017, sought views on the six replacement street names proposed by the local authority.Footnote 28 The consultation was opened to residents of the six streets and owners of businesses, institutions and churches located on these streets. Consultation documents were distributed directly to the residents’ home addresses and could be completed online. A total of eighty-four people took part in the consultations. One question was asked: What is your opinion on the proposed street name? The report from consultations reproduced all individual responses to the above question submitted on the sixty-eight consultation forms.Footnote 29 Table 3 presents the quantitative results of the consultations.
Table 3. Respondents’ views on the proposed new street names, Katowice, 2017a
a See Urząd Miasta Katowice, Raport z konsultacji społecznych dotyczących zmian nazw ulic, 4.
These three consultations varied in scale, methods and scope. Warsaw and Łódź councils sought views from the wider community, while Katowice consulted only those directly affected. This differing approach gave prominence to different stakeholders: those incurring the financial and practical costs of renaming, those using the renamed spaces in everyday life, and those with emotional ties to neighbourhoods. Moreover, these consultations were organised to seek views on different aspects of the de-communisation law (on street names that potentially could be renamed, on those already renamed, and on propositions for new street names).Footnote 30 As seen in Tables 1–3, despite variations across different street names, the overall trend was clear: the renaming was not popular with respondents. The majority of respondents in Warsaw (53 per cent to 63 per cent, depending on the street) rejected the renaming, while between 28 per cent and 32 per cent of respondents favoured the change. The results in Łódź were less uniform than those in Warsaw. The renaming of two streets was narrowly accepted, with yes votes ranging from 16 per cent to 46 per cent. However, the majority of respondents rejected the renaming of twenty-four streets, with no votes ranging from 42 per cent to 68 per cent depending on the street. Equally, the renaming of Zwycięstwo Square was opposed by over 90 per cent of the respondents. Even in Katowice, where the consultation concerned only the proposed replacement names and not the de-communisation process itself, the majority of respondents used the consultations to express their objection to the mandatory renaming of streets.
To be sure, the use of data from these consultations has limitations. First, demographic information such as age, gender, education level and occupation was not collected (though some respondents volunteered this data), making it impossible to systematically compare responses by demographic variables. Second, the consultation took place during the intense political conflict between opposition parties led by the centre-right Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska; PO) and the national-conservative Law and Justice party government (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość; PiS) over the implementation of the de-communisation legislation. Thus, the lack of information on how the respondents’ opinions correlate with political orientation makes it more difficult to discern whether those opposing the de-communisation of public space were automatically hostile to any policies proposed by the PiS party. Third, considering those who chose not to respond to consultations, the results cannot be seen as representative of the urban population at large. For example, they do not align with a national opinion poll conducted by Poland's Public Opinion Research Centre in 2018, which shows that Poles were more equally divided on the de-communisation law, with 43 per cent of respondents supporting it and 44 per cent stating they were against it.Footnote 31 At the same time, residents are more inclined to reject the renaming of streets when it involves their public space. Results from consultations (some with very high response rates) organised over the last three decades in different Polish localities consistently showed a similar result: most respondents rejected the renaming of their own street.Footnote 32 Finally, the study is limited by the absence of comments from those who supported the renaming. The overwhelming majority of respondents motivated enough to submit a comment in the consultation process were against the renaming. Additional quantitative interviews and records from councils’ street naming teams would have been useful for gaining a further understanding of the popular reception of street renaming. Notwithstanding these limitations, the qualitative data emerging from the three consultations allows for a deeper exploration of the practices and discursive strategies urban residents adopted to resist change. It also offers detailed insights into how residents perceived the impact of top-down changes to urban streetscapes on their lives.
Semantic Displacement, Ideological Monopoly and De-communisation Procedures
The renaming of streets in Poland peaked in 1990 and began to decline noticeably after 1993. According to the administrative legislation regulating the functioning of local governments in Poland, local councils are responsible for naming (and renaming) public space.Footnote 33 Thus, the process was uneven geographically as local authorities adopted differing approaches to toponymic change.Footnote 34 Whether a street name was removed depended mainly on the political composition of councils and the number of post-communist councillors. They usually voted against any street renaming resolutions. An additional obstacle to street renaming was the ‘electorate’ itself, as councils were wary of making changes unpopular with residents. In 2016, around 1,200 to 1,400 street and square names ‘symbolising communism’ were still in use, according to official estimates.Footnote 35 To address this problem, the ruling PiS party proposed a de-communisation law, passed by the Polish parliament in 2016. The law obliged local authorities to rename public spaces (streets, bridges, squares), buildings and objects that commemorated people, organisations, events and dates ‘symbolising the repressive, authoritarian and non-sovereign system of power in Poland in the years 1944–1989’.Footnote 36 If local governments did not make the required changes, provincial governors – who are appointed by the national government – were mandated to issue administrative decisions that enforced the law (i.e. themselves renaming the ‘communist streets’ in their provinces). The Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej; IPN), the state-sponsored centre that investigates Nazi and communist crimes and preserves the memory of these crimes, was the primary facilitator of the renaming process. The institute prepared in advance a list consisting of over a hundred names that the law applied to and provided advice to local authorities and governors on street name changes.Footnote 37 It also prepared biographies of top communists and revised interpretations of historical events previously endorsed by communist historiography; these were to be used in the renaming process and justify its mandatory character.Footnote 38 The IPN expected that once people become aware of the actual biographies of the commemorated officials, they would be willing to accept the street renaming. The belief was that, by and large, people pay attention to street names and value their commemorative significance. And if they do not, they should be educated accordingly.Footnote 39
In contrast, cultural geographers researching toponymic change draw our attention to urban residents’ unreflective and commonplace relationship with commemorative street names. People's attitudes to streetscapes are shaped by daily routines and activities that occur in a specific space as well as at a specific time. As the memory of historical figures and events fades away, the meaning of commemorative street names is lost too. Consequently, ‘street names often become empty signifiers to many urban residents who use them as spatial identifiers on a daily basis’.Footnote 40 One of the more interesting effects of this ‘unreflective relationship’ is people's resistance to the remaking of their everyday space. As mentioned earlier, Light and Young show that twenty years after renaming took place, residents of Bucharest still used the communist-era names. They argue that this occurred because of everyday habit and inertia rather than ‘conscious resistance’ against the new hegemonic version of the national past.Footnote 41 They explain habit formation in the following way: ‘The practice of using a particular name can be treated as a form of behavior, and once the association between a name and a location is learned, the use of that name quickly becomes habitual. Like any habit, use of that name will be resistant to change while the context in which the name is being used is stable.’Footnote 42 By the context here, they mean a location – a market or a street – used for the same everyday purposes. Light and Young admit ‘the shift from socialism to postsocialism represents a dramatic change of context’ but argue that this change is of secondary importance when it comes to habit.Footnote 43
In Poland, the de-communisation law came into force almost thirty years after the fall of communism. Therefore, the ‘context’ in which a street name was being used was stable on both accounts identified by Light and Young. Hence, it is no surprise that many respondents who participated in the consultations in Warsaw, Łódź and Katowice argued that the street names from the communist era did not offend anyone. One of the respondents explained: ‘It didn't bother me for forty years and it doesn't bother me now either.’Footnote 44 Street names were just orientation points in the topography of their city, an integral part of its built environment, and a location in daily life. ‘A street is just a street, no one who lives on a given street identifies with the person whose name the street is named after.’Footnote 45 Moreover some respondents suggested that the entire de-communisation effort would inevitably fail: ‘The change will only introduce chaos […] and residents will still use the familiar terms [street names] out of habit.’Footnote 46 This apparent loss of the commemorative meaning of street names may explain the widespread popularity of a renaming mechanism that implemented the de-communisation law while preserving the original name. According to this mechanism, ‘the former denotation was “removed” and replaced by a new one, while the name form was kept intact’.Footnote 47 For example, many respondents taking part in the Warsaw consultation proposed that a street named after Józef Ciszewski (a member of the interwar Communist Party of Poland) should be changed to Józef Ciszewski (an interwar football player) or Jan Ciszewski (a sports commentator).Footnote 48 After such a renaming, Ciszewski Street would remain Ciszewski Street, allowing residents of the affected street to keep their old address. The fact that local authorities frequently employed such a renaming mechanism shows that they themselves recognised the limited significance of commemorative street names.Footnote 49
Maoz Azaryahu argues that the erosion of the historical meaning of street names is unavoidable as commemorative toponyms are affected by ‘semantic displacement’ the very moment a historical name is given to a street. In his words: ‘Naming a street after a historical figure or event triggers a fundamental semantic displacement as a result of the change of referential framework that occurs when a historical name becomes a spatial designation.’Footnote 50 The process intensifies over time but to a different degree; this is because a name will be affected by several factors such as ‘reputations, mythologies, images, and sociospatial practices’.Footnote 51 After all, there are commemorative streets that can retain their symbolic power for a long time. For example, some communist-era streets were renamed immediately after the fall of communism, without protest, as they were commonly associated with the Soviet subjugation of Poland. What's more, almost thirty years later, these long-gone street names were still being used to justify the mandatory renaming. Although there were no more Dzerzhinsky Streets in Poland, politicians and memory activists supporting the 2016 law repeatedly demanded that Polish streetscapes be cleansed of Dzerzhinsky.Footnote 52 This discursive device was also deployed during the consultations.Footnote 53
At the same time, renaming processes can renew public interest in the symbolic significance of street names. After all, renaming is directly concerned with the historical referent of toponyms and the meaning imposed on them. Moreover, renaming does not happen in a vacuum. The meaning of many streets identified by the IPN as ‘glorifying communism’ became the focus of heated public debates, political disagreements and acts of resistance.Footnote 54 Local authorities used the biographical notes written by the IPN in the consultation process. This was done either to justify the street renaming or to confront residents with the IPN's version of national history. The latter – as in Warsaw – was done to defend a council's objection to implementing the law. In this context of polarisation and conflict, some participants in the consultations chose to argue for retaining the old street names primarily because of their commemorative function rather than their role as spatial designators. Their argumentation followed three lines of reasoning. First, the reliability and integrity of the system assessing street names were questioned. The IPN was portrayed as a politicised institution that advanced its own commemorative agenda and prepared biased biographies of historical figures and partisan explanations of historical events. These views questioning the IPN's professionalism and trustworthiness were especially prevalent in Warsaw, as here respondents were directly asked about their opinion on whether the street banned by the IPN glorified communism. For example, one of the Warsaw respondents observed: ‘The IPN should either provide all the facts or none at all, because if it selectively chooses what fits into a pre-established theory, it is propaganda.’Footnote 55 Second, it was argued that no political group should ideologically monopolise public space. The assessment of the Polish People's Republic should be more balanced and consider the post-war geopolitical situation, the Polish communist regime's modernisation achievements and the communists’ contribution to the fight against Nazism.Footnote 56 Third, there was the contentious issue of streets named after writers, poets and scientists. Many respondents felt that these figures were remembered for their artistic or scientific achievements, not because they belonged to a communist party. As one Katowice resident explained with respect to the writer Kruczkowski: ‘He was not a torturer, he did not work in the Security Service. Above all, he was a writer and a playwright.’Footnote 57 This resistance to the mandatory renaming had less to do with nostalgia for communist-era job security and social welfare provision (as seen in the 1990s) and more to do with distrust of top-down revisions of the past and objection to the political instrumentalisation of history. This lack of confidence in the de-communisation procedures was summarised by one Łódź inhabitant as follows: ‘To me it's simply a witch hunt, I believe that if I persevered, I could find a counterargument that would demonstrate that every single street is named improperly, it's a matter of perspective’.Footnote 58 Thus, it is unsurprising that several respondents expressed concern that the 2016 renaming might not be the final one, given regimes’ tendency to employ streetscapes for self-legitimisation despite the impact these revisions have on people.Footnote 59
Clearly, the symbolic value of commemorative street names was often lost on urban residents. At the same time, as we have seen, a commemorative dimension that had faded was sometimes rediscovered, and the historical meanings of street names were reinterpreted. In both instances, however, the respondents used the consultations to question the very premises of the 2016 legislation. They contested the right of the authorities to make the renaming mandatory and demanded that local communities be involved in decision-making. Even when the respondents objected to the renaming because of practical costs – discussed in the next section – they often framed their argument in terms of democratic rights. They expected public officials and governing bodies to recognise their concerns and used the consultations to insist that no changes were made without their consent.
‘Nobody Cares about Us’Footnote 60 – the Everyday Impact of Street Renaming
The issue of practical costs when it comes to street renaming has attracted little scholarly interest. The existing research on toponymic change acknowledges that this is a crucial factor shaping urban residents’ responses but this topic is usually considered only in passing. Likewise, Polish politicians, IPN officials and public history consultants – while admitting that practical costs affected local communities’ attitudes to street name changes – did not seriously engage with this issue. Over two decades, when different versions of the bill on the de-communisation of public space were debated in the Polish parliament, the topic did not provoke any substantial exchanges either in the parliamentary commissions scrutinising the various de-communisation bills or plenary sessions.Footnote 61 It was treated as an unavoidable consequence of dealing with the material heritage of communist dictatorship. Even when, in 2016, legislators finally tried to mitigate the problem, this was done with half measures and without careful consideration of the everyday impact of name-changing.Footnote 62 And yet, the consultation responses show that the practical costs are of primary concern to residents. The issue arose in multiple contexts in consultations in Katowice, Łódź and Warsaw. Changing a street name requires updating an address with banks, hospitals, schools, utilities and shops, and other official bodies. All this demands time and effort and many respondents resented having to deal with it. The group that felt particularly affected were the owners of businesses and tradespeople. Rubber stamps, promotional brochures, business cards, and headed paper need to be replaced, to mention the most obvious examples. After making a list of things that had to be taken care of, one Katowice respondent concluded: ‘we don't care who W. Stahl was, to me, it's some nonsense and more money thrown down the drain, both MINE and the COUNCIL's.’Footnote 63 Capital letters and exclamation marks signalled the strength of feeling here. The respondent also claimed that he did not care who a street was named after. This was not an unusual response. In the 2007 national survey conducted by the Public Opinion Research Centre, 65 per cent of respondents said it did not matter to them who a street was named after (it did matter to 30 per cent of respondents).Footnote 64 However, what is more interesting here is that the respondent felt angry not only about the personal inconvenience but also about the cost incurred by the local administration.Footnote 65 This shift from individual to collective concerns and focus on the shared life in a local community was a strategy frequently used by respondents who objected to new street names. They contrasted the effort that went into renaming with the authorities’ disregard for the physical environment of their cities. The subjects of, above all, potholes, lighting and unsafe road infrastructure were focused on by respondents to portray the authorities as neglectful and incapable of taking care of local matters: ‘My street has needed repairs for years, and not a single know-it-all has lifted a finger to make things move forward. Instead, we, together with our neighbours, have repeatedly had our cars’ suspension damaged.’Footnote 66
Moreover, respondents often discussed the renaming in the wider context of public dissatisfaction with the local services. They questioned the authorities’ spending priorities, with some respondents demanding that taxpayers’ money be channelled into hospitals, orphanages and childcare facilities rather than on the symbolic remaking of public space.Footnote 67 What's more, once the street renaming was discussed in the context of low trust in the competency of those holding power, the entire de-communisation process became suspect. As one Łódź respondent explained: ‘There's no asphalt here, only potholed concrete slabs that can damage your car. […] Currently, the state of this street rather than its name reminds me of the communist times, personally the name doesn't bother me, it's short and easy to remember [emphasis added].’Footnote 68 Here, the respondent referred to wider political disagreements over the post-communist transition in Poland to discredit the de-communisation of public space.Footnote 69 The proponents of mandatory street renaming positioned themselves as the only ‘truly Polish’ force in the country trying to deal with the historical legacies of the communist past.Footnote 70 The final disappearance of the communist material heritage was to be a sign that Poland was, at last, a sovereign state. By juxtaposing the dilapidated infrastructure with the politicians’ symbolic posturing, the respondent questioned the actual post-communist transformation of Poland.
The framing of the de-communisation of public space as evidence of the authorities’ limited understanding of people's everyday lives was particularly noticeable when respondents discussed the effect the street renaming would have on the elderly and vulnerable. Two themes were prominent: the loss of toponymic familiarity and challenges related to health and disability. Concerns were expressed about older people's sense of security and stability and the impact on independent living.Footnote 71 One respondent observed: ‘When street names are changed there will be total chaos in Łódź. Older people won't know how to navigate […]. Things are good as they are. Why change them?’Footnote 72 The fear of losing control over the physical environment was felt more strongly in cities, which seemed particularly affected by the renaming. In Łódź, twenty-six streets were listed on the consultation form. In the context of the size of the Łódź streetscape, this number might not appear high, but still, the possibility of ‘chaos in the city’ was brought up by several respondents.
The view that the elderly, vulnerable and frail had not been taken into account in the renaming process also emerged in comments related to updating the address on official documents.Footnote 73 In Warsaw, during an open meeting in the Mokotów district, a simple question was posed: ‘[...] will someone from the City Council come to their homes with a photographer and all the necessary forms?’Footnote 74 Here, the anger and frustration were directed at the local council, even though the Warsaw authorities were against the mandatory street renaming and tried to use the consultation process to legitimise their objections to the de-communisation law. Moreover, according to the 2016 law, updating ID cards was unnecessary. This limited understanding of the practical implications of the law only further increased the already low popularity of street renaming.Footnote 75 Clearly, some of these anxieties could have been alleviated in advance with effective communication that would increase trust in local systems responsible for the practical aspect of the renaming. Yet, the authorities did not formulate a clear strategy to mitigate the practical costs. There was little reflection on what street alterations meant in practice for urban residents, particularly marginalised and vulnerable groups.Footnote 76 The respondents overwhelmingly mentioned practical costs as the key factor shaping responses to the de-communisation of public space. However, the literature on streetscapes also shows that practical costs are sometimes used as a pretext for concealing other objections to renaming.Footnote 77 In the case discussed in this paper, it was clear that residents found it easier to raise the issue of time and effort costs than to express personal and subjective feelings about street renaming.
A Sense of Self, Life Trajectory and Ageing in Place
A great deal of recent research into street renaming in Western societies has focused on marginalised groups and their social and racial struggles for the right to have their histories and memories inscribed into the commemorative landscape.Footnote 78 Commenting on urban streetscapes as sites of socio-political resistance, Rose-Redwood, Alderman and Azaryahu remind us that ‘a city's road network is not simply a set of abstract spaces and flows but also the vehicle for emotions, memory, and a sense of place’.Footnote 79 After all, names of urban spaces are essential for group self-definition, collective identities and the politics of belonging and exclusion. Much less is known, however, about the everyday aspects of emotional engagement with street names. Why do some people feel emotional about street names? To probe this type of engagement, I draw on Low and Altman's concept of place attachment, defined as the emotional bonds people develop with the physical environment.Footnote 80 Among the many functions that place attachment fulfils in people's lives (and which are summarised by Law and Altman as various ‘self-definitional processes’), the preservation of a person's self-identity through a connection to an ‘everyday physical setting’ is of relevance to this paper.Footnote 81 How does a sense of self and personal memories of life experiences that have occurred in a particular physical setting become affected by the alteration of this setting?
The renaming of streets alters people's relationship with their everyday space. Although the actual physical space does not change, the alteration of the name that denotes this space is often experienced as a difficult-to-explain loss. Only a handful of respondents commented on this more personal and subjective area of street renaming. When this occurred, the disappearance of the name was usually discussed in the context of past lived experiences. For example, the issue came up in Katowice in a comment concerning the renaming of Szenwald Street (a poet and Communist Party activist) to Prus Street (one of the most influential writers in the history of Polish literature). An older respondent who had lived on Szenwald Street for most of his life observed: ‘If it makes the government happy, please change it. It's a shame: I've spent most of my life on Szenwald Street, and I will die on B. Prus Street. I know the biographies and works of both gentlemen.’Footnote 82
The comment, though concise, effectively communicates a sense of sadness about the renaming felt by the respondent. The change affected his most private space: the street where his home was located, which had witnessed the major events in his life. The street name framed the narrative of his life, gave contours to it. The literature on place attachment shows that the strength of emotional bonds with places is relative to time. As people live and age in the same location, they develop a sense of continuity in their lives ‘by connecting certain places with specific past experiences’.Footnote 83 Consequently, any change to one's physical environment is experienced as a loss of personal control over one's life. Research conducted by environmental psychologists suggests that the elderly cope with this loss of control in one of two ways. Either they take direct action to regain control or accept that realities cannot be changed and try to restructure ‘the meaning of the situation’ to avoid feeling powerless.Footnote 84 Overall, the latter response is more common. Here, the respondent from Katowice resigns stoically from battling the de-communisation law. However, by distancing himself from the renaming process – ‘If it makes the government happy, please change it.’ – he shifts the balance of power in his favour and regains control over the situation. He feels his loss, but above all, he pities the irrational and immature PiS government.
However, the impact of street renaming on a sense of self-identity and preservation of this identity is not restricted to older people. As Lewicka demonstrated in her landmark study on the relationship between place attachment and place identity in urban areas, ‘the most consistent predictor of place attachment was residence time’.Footnote 85 During the consultations, one thirty-six-year-old respondent who lived all her life in Łódź explained: ‘[...] Łódź will lose its character and identity. […] I went to high school on Zula Pacanowska Street, in my consciousness and memory it's my time on Zula Pacanowska [Street], if you change the name, you will completely destroy it.’Footnote 86 The respondent had attended a high school on this street, developing strong bonds with it, and associating it with past experiences during a formative period of her life. Thus this street name was integral to a biographical narrative of her adolescent years and served as a trigger for personal memories of her past self. Once the name was changed, these experiences would be – to use her own words – destroyed: ‘If you change the name, you will completely destroy it.’
Tellingly, the respondent, while defending the name ‘Zula Pacanowska Street’, mentioned not only the disruption to the narrative of her own life but also the disruption to the place identity of the city of Łódź itself. The respondent valued the street name because it was also part of the local heritage and served as a form of public memory. Zula Pacanowska was a pre-war communist activist who died in the Chełmno extermination camp in 1942.Footnote 87 As Low and Altman remind us: ‘individual self-definitions often incorporate group and cultural processes, meanings, and values’.Footnote 88 The self-definitional processes are intertwined. Places represented by specific names become integral to growing up as we invest our neighbourhoods with social and personal meaning. This overlapping of individual and collective levels of attachment was very much visible in another comment contributed by the resident from Łódź: ‘it is best to stick to the original nomenclature […] what is crucial for us residents is that we all identify with a place that we know well (many street names have existed since the beginning of the housing estate), with the place where we were raised and grew up, with a name that has been with us forever and does not trouble us in any way’.Footnote 89
People's memories of places rely on physical traces of the past, or ‘urban reminders’, which include street names. Lewicka argues that ‘urban reminders’ play a more significant role in attachment to places with local significance than national ones.Footnote 90 The above-cited respondent drew on localised knowledge about the area to explain their position. This street is located on the Bolesław Chrobry housing estate in Widzew, one of the industrial districts of Łódź. The estate was built by the workers’ housing cooperative in the years 1974–81. While explaining that the street name has existed ‘since the beginning’ of the estate, the respondent manages to convey their sense of pride in and emotional bond with the place. The name fosters a connection among the residents and creates a shared sense of belonging. Once this connection is severed, the authenticity of past experiences becomes somehow less certain. Thus, changing the names of places should not be taken lightly. Yet, the perception was that the authorities were unconcerned with the effect renaming would have on people's daily lives. The respondent concluded their comment with: ‘The idea [the renaming] is a sign of immense ignorance on the part of the governor and other people ruling over us.’Footnote 91
Conclusion
The fall of communism in Eastern Europe did not bring about widespread destruction of the material heritage of communist dictatorships in the region. Given that public acceptance of the regime change has been high, the process of de-commemoration has been more protracted than anticipated. One of the key factors contributing to this slow pace of change was urban residents’ opposition to street name changes. This paper investigated why this was the case by analysing responses from public consultations conducted in Warsaw, Łódź and Katowice following the introduction of mandatory street renaming in 2016 in Poland. The consultations varied in terms of scope, scale and method. Despite these differences, the same concerns and issues emerged from the responses.
Most importantly, what stands out from the analysed material is the extent to which a combination of interplaying causes has shaped urban residents’ reception of the de-communisation of public space. If we discuss these causes in isolation, we will fail to grasp the complexity of urban residents’ relationships with places and the different functions that commemorative street names simultaneously serve in people's everyday lives. Focusing on a single cause contributing to urban residents’ resistance to de-communisation of public space, such as habitual practices or ideological resistance, can imply that these causes are mutually exclusive. This can prevent us from recognising the dynamic and evolving nature of different local populations’ responses to symbolic change. We also risk overlooking the degree to which the social and political specificity of the de-commemoration process shapes the discursive strategies residents adopt to oppose toponymic change. In the case of Poland, thirty years after the fall of communism, the perceptions of the de-communisation of public space were affected by the democratic back-sliding during the PiS's time in power. The IPN was seen by many sections of Polish society as a biased institution that served the political purpose of the government in power. Once trust in public institutions that campaigned for the remaking of streetscapes had eroded, it was harder to persuade local communities that commemorative renaming was a transitional justice mechanism rather than partisan commemorative politics.
However, the results from the consultations also confirm the continued relevance of practical issues when it comes to street renaming, which is in line with earlier findings from Romania and Ukraine. The most frequently raised concerns focused on the financial costs, time and effort renaming entails, and the possible disruption to daily routines that changes to a local streetscape might bring. The consultations in Poland, however, also shed light on the impact renaming had on elderly and vulnerable citizens, who have largely been neglected in discussions on post-communist symbolic change. What's more, the responses raise new questions about the connection between resistance to street renaming and place attachments people form with their everyday space. Names play a critical role in the formation of a wider communal sense of place identity. However, they also contribute to a sense of stability, security, and familiarity with one's physical surroundings. They play an essential role in preserving personal memories and providing coherence to the narrative of one's life. Judging from the consultation material, respondents found it difficult to talk about street renaming and their personal and emotional bonds with places. Clearly, more research is warranted to explore how emotional attachments to the names of streets affect public responses to the removal of the material heritage of communist dictatorships.
The Polish case also underscored how the very process of the de-commemoration of public space (how it is implemented) affects the reception of change among urban residents. The consultation responses analysed in this paper provide insights into people's understanding of their democratic right to be meaningfully consulted on renaming (beyond mere formality or tokenism). The respondents were not afraid of expressing their disapproval of the top-down toponymic change and the entire renaming process regarding its transparency and implementation. The discursive strategies employed to discredit the de-communisation law focused on the issue of trust in the authorities’ competence, general dissatisfaction with public services and the allocation of resources. The common thread connecting the different responses to street renaming in all three cities was a lack of trust in the authorities’ capacity to understand the local community's needs and the everyday challenges residents face. Once the authorities have been portrayed as neglectful and ineffective in addressing community needs, they lose the right to control and shape people's everyday space. The removal of the material heritage of communist dictatorship was supposed to reflect a rejection of the undemocratic communist past. Thirty years after the fall of communism, the top-down and mandatory renaming of street names did not sit well with many Poles who expected the de-commemoration process to reflect their views and wishes.
Finally, the paper also offers insights into de-commemoration as a form of social control and brings the issue of consent mechanisms for street renaming to the fore. How should national and local authorities respond to the refusal of residents to accept changes to urban streetscapes? Should democratic states have the right to enforce top-down control over local heritage? Which modes of action and discourse engender resistance and foster conflict? These questions warrant attention not only in post-communist Eastern Europe. As Western societies debate how to deal with colonial street names, they also face the question of how to effectively engage local residents in the process of renaming and symbolic decolonisation.Footnote 92 At issue is how to resolve the tension between local residents’ emotional attachment to the space they live in and the street name changes that occur as part of a broader struggle for racial equality and social justice.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the journal's editors for their helpful suggestions and comments on the text. I would also like to thank Anne White and Jan Gryta for inviting me to the 5th annual workshop of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies Polish Studies Group, held at University College London in September 2023, where the initial ideas for this paper were discussed.
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