Many cities want to achieve the 'Bilbao effect'. Katowice stands a chance
past and the hoped-for future of Katowice, visit Bogucice. The Warszawa II coal mineshaft, the largest of the southern Polish city’s old Hard Coal Mine, has long dominated this northern district. Its skeleton and giant winch-wheel loom over a tangle of highways and communist-era tower blocks. Such, for decades, was the image of the capital of the coal-mining region of Silesia: unbeautifully industrial, pollution-scarred and hopelessly reliant on hydrocarbon.
The ravages of first Nazi and then communist control deprived the city of many of its most beautiful buildings. Since the fall of communism the city has slowly come to terms with the decline and closure of many of the mines that had thundered and churned since Winkler’s time. Katowice’s leaders are inspired by the post-industrial reinvention of cities like Glasgow, Lille and Essen, but especially Bilbao. The Basque city has used cultural institutions like its monumental outpost of the Guggenheim Museum to strike out on a new path since the 1990s. Katowice wants to do the same with the National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra on the site of the oldKatowice coal mine in Bogucice and the new Silesian Museum in Warszawa II nearby.
Many cities want to achieve the “Bilbao effect”. Doing so takes an alchemical mix of creativity, ambition and luck. But Katowice stands a chance. Even by the standards of Poland’s booming economy, it is doing very well. Overall unemployment is low , and the city’s squares, not to mention its futuristic Galeria Katowicka shopping centre, teem with workers and shoppers. Not for them the empty streets and boarded-up shops of other former coal-mining regions of Europe.
Can it last? The Polish boom will not endure forever. The final mines will eventually close. With its mighty unions and veneration of Saint Barbara , Katowice remains at heart a coal city. But Alicja Knast, the director of the Silesian Museum, reckons it can reinvent itself. The city passed through many hands over the centuries. It has experimented with various religions. Once Protestant, it is now Catholic.
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