Building Poland
Every place I've lived in Poland has had a building site next to it. I haven't chosen to live next to building sites, it's just that wherever I live, somebody eventually starts building something nearby. Perhaps it's a coincidence, or perhaps Polish people generally can't sleep without a jackhammer lullaby.
When I first became aware of this phenomenon, I tried to find places to live that couldn't possibly be built next to. This proved to be impossible. No matter how settled and complete the neighbourhood looked, the big yellow diggers would always turn up eventually and start excavating foundations on a tiny square of empty land that I hadn't noticed.
The tower crane is replacing the stork as the symbol of Poland. White, spindly and vast they swoop above the rooftops of cities delivering the modern dreams of Poland – new flats, shopping centres and shiny office blocks. If you live in a city, look out of your window now and I'll bet you can see one silently swinging on the skyline.
There are two of them right outside my window. I've been waiting for them to arrive for over a year, but I knew they would come eventually. I had spotted the empty land where they would nest even before I moved in. Now they're finally here, I can relax in the familiar soundscape of clanging, hammering and shouting.
The arrival of the cranes has presented me with a neat metaphor of Poland today, because there are now two construction projects going on in my neighbourhood. On one side of the road a property developer is erecting a set of crisp, new blocks of flats. On the other, local government workers are renovating a dilapidated 1970s estate. It's modern, business-orientated Poland facing off against old, bureaucracy-ridden Poland.
The contrast could not be more stark. The new building site is a miracle of efficiency, technology and hard work. Energetic men in pristine high-visibility vests and hard hats turn up before sunrise and start up their sparkling machinery. There are cranes of all kinds, digging machines, concrete mixers and sprayers, trucks and bulldozers and, for all I know, lasers and high-energy particle accelerators. They work in rain, fog, darkness and tornadoes and progress is breathtakingly rapid.
On the other side of the road, the activity is rather less impressive. There are fewer hard hats and high-visibility vests and more blue overalls and large stomachs. In the time it has taken to erect the entire ground floor of the new block, scaffolding has been slowly and laboriously erected along one side of the old block. There was a short period of hammering and large pieces of rubbish being thrown into the shrubbery before the scaffolding was taken down again to reveal a building that looked exactly the same as it had before. Part of the scaffolding was then re-erected, presumably because somebody had left their hat on the roof.
This is the Poland I see all around me – one part of society is steaming ahead building stadiums and programming robots and making piles of cash while another part is inefficiently fiddling around to little effect and stamping documents 17 times each. I haven't yet decided which part I want to join.
Jamie Stokes
