Under Municipal "Care"

Under Municipal "Care"

The processes of European cities development, typical of the nineteenth century, did not stop in the interwar period. After the First World War one more point was added to the major challenges of urbanization — that of a post-war reconstruction. However, with the gradual bringing of cities in order, the intensive urbanization model, proper to the turn of the century, was relatively quick to return (Bairoch, 1988, 302-303). The war, in its special way, even stimulated these processes, causing large-scale migratory movements and inserting innovative elements in the usual practices of architects, engineers, and officials.

     It was the municipal authorities that became the main subject of urban transformation in Europe after the First World War. A considerable tendency to limit the spontaneous activity of developers, either private firms or individuals, was delineated in the late nineteenth – early twentieth centuries. By the 1920s some of the metropolises, such as London, Berlin or Paris, had accumulated a great positive experience of systematic urban planning on the part of local authorities. Their example was gradually taken over by other European cities. It was suffrage democratization that played an important role in increasing the municipal authorities' attention to the issues of the city organization. Although in the early twentieth century access to the municipal elections was still limited by certain property and tax qualifications, the internal stratification of voters disappeared. That is why support from the citizens of the average level of prosperity became increasingly important for the authorities. This circumstance forced the city officials to expand the list of their responsibilities (see Бонусяк, 2000, 84; Lees, 2014).

     Interwar Poland consisted of territories which previously were part of different state formations — German, Russian, and Habsburg Empires. Accordingly, there were, officially, three independent systems of urban self-government in the country till the early 1930s. Lviv, like Cracow, represented the tradition and experience of city life inherent in the Austrian provinces. The functioning of the city was determined by a special statute or charter, which remained in force in independent Poland until 1933. However, after the war the formal validity of the statute was limited by some amendments giving primacy to the central government. The magistrate's structure and duties were continually changed. In general, the changes were directed, on the one hand, at improving the functionality in new post-war conditions and, on the other hand, at limiting the city authorities in favor of the central government. In March of 1933, after the law on partial change of local self-government structure was adopted, Lviv nearly lost its "special" status, and the main task of the city mayor was the implementation of directives from the center. It was purely practical questions of organization and structure which remained in the jurisdiction of the magistrate. The State also transferred to the city many of the so-called "commissioned" issues, i.e. tax collection, postal service, legal procedure, recruiting soldiers, etc., which the magistrate had to carry out on its own expense. Accordingly, very little resources were left for purely city needs. This was especially true of the areas of education, social care or health care, which were a heavy burden on the city budget (Klimek, 2006, 23-25).

     In the mid-1920s Lviv managed to restore a more or less normal city life. However, some problems remained which were inherited from the rapid pre-war development. The negative impact of the war manifested itself not only in direct material losses and destruction of existing infrastructure, but also in the fact that the solution of important urgent issues of the city proper regulation, which had become actual before the war, was delayed for several decades. Problems concerning housing, city infrastructure, connecting houses to the water and electricity supply systems were first on the list of priorities.

     Compared to other Polish cities, which had similar difficulties, Lviv had a specially acute problem of small apartments caused by the predominance of small houses and one- and two-room apartments in the city. Many Lviv residents, 7.6% of the population as of 1921, lived in basements or in attics (Бонусяк, 2000, 235). In the suburbs the urban poor usually lived in dugouts and barracks. Destitute workers often had to live in the premises of factories or plants where they worked. This was accompanied by very high prices of buying and leasing houses, all because of high demand. It was quite usual that rooms owned by poor families were rented by still poorer tenants (Makarczuk, 240). An intense flow of workers from nearby villages and towns far exceeded the slow growth rate of housing construction, which was outlined after 1926 and lasted until the great crisis of the early 1930s. The city authorities tried to extend their care to the poorest by building barracks for the homeless and those without shelter. In particular, in the late 1920s a few blocks of barracks were built on vul. Poltvyana (ul. Pełtewna) and Dzherelna (ul. Źródlana, at the former location of the city slaughterhouse).

     The low-income citizens were also helped by public committees and associations. A typical case is the list of the unemployed, attempted to be made by a committee formed at the church of St. Martin in Pidzamche. The registration of those who needed help had to be stopped soon, as the committee was addressed by much more people than expected (Makarczuk, 239).

     In 1936 the scope of construction (primarily residential) finally reached and exceeded the 1913 figures (Bohdanova, 2004, 171). This was due to the presence of new areas in the southern part of the city and a special preferential program for municipal and family housing. So, many new buildings were either elite villas or affordable social apartments. Actually, the last (but not too large) category of new buildings prevailed in Pidzamche in the 1920s-1930s. Thus, at the beginning of vul. Donetska, there are two residential municipal buildings built in the mid-1920s. The four-storied one was for the city municipal service workers, the three-storied one was meant for workers of urban enterprises and institutions. More often, however, the authorities resorted not to the construction of new homes, but to the completion or restructuring of old buildings, like the house on vul. Lemkivska, 24.

     Among the important problems of the city in the postwar years, there were infectious diseases and poor sanitary conditions of the urban environment. Various epidemics, typical of war, were overcome in 1920-1923. In general, however, the situation remained alarming, as in other cities which survived the war. The municipal authorities did not have sufficient resources to carry out necessary large-scale structural changes in their policy and system actions. Nevertheless, the northern district, as the most dangerous in terms of sanitary, attracted increased attention. As early as 1919 in a house on vul. Henerala Hrekova an epidemiological hospital was arranged, and the so-called "peoples' baths" functioned on pl. Misionerów (now, probably vul. Detka) and ul. Balonowa (now vul. Haidamatska), where the services were provided free of charge or at very low prices (Lwów na granicy ...,1934, 43).

     In the 1920s the problem of pre-municipal villages appeared to be particularly acute. Being de facto an integral part of Lviv, they did not formally fall under the authority of the city, which limited the proper control and regulation of the territory. First of all, it concerned the northern and western suburban communes, which had already lost their previous rustic look and turned into working-class districts with the highest population density of all neighbourhoods and a dense, almost urban housing. Due to low prices for land a large number of businesses, shops, and taverns were concentrated there. On the one hand, the northern suburbs could be considered a useful resource as Zamarstyniv, Klepariv, Pidzamche, and Pidholosko were an extremely important source of cheap labor, cheap products and commodities for Lviv's economy. On the other hand, according to Ignacy Drexler, a Lviv engineer and official, this vicinity was "fatal" (Drexler, 1920) and was a separate challenge to urban planning. From the city's perspective, the northern and western suburbs looked unregulated, dirty, and dangerous areas which did not fall under the influence of the city police; it was from there that, allegedly, a "dance of witches," i.e., infectious diseases, came again and again. Apart from that, large-scale manipulations with land led to a chaotic development without an adequate infrastructure. These districts lacked not only gas, water, electricity, and sanitation, but also schools or hospitals.

     In practical terms, Lviv was behind the leading cities of Central Europe, but the theoretical reasons for relevant urban transformations were formulated by the city council still before the war: it was in 1901 that the basic concept of the city with attached suburbs was presented. However, the implementation of these and other ideas was constantly postponed. Immediately after the war the next stage of the efforts to implement the idea began. In 1919-1921 Lviv architects and engineers created a draft of a new construction charter, which suggested adopting new approaches to the city development. The attention of the local authorities was drawn by a work of Ignacy Drexler, an engineer and municipal official, entitled "Great Lviv" (Drexler, 1920), which included arguments for the suitability of the city expansion and considerations regarding the practical implementation of this idea. Several years later, the magistrate charged Ignacy Drexler and Tadeusz Tolwiński, a professor of the Warsaw Polytechnic, to work out specific projects of the development of the city with the attached suburbs. Both projects had many common points: improving the road network and railway lines (construction of circular routes, new highways, tunnels under the Vysokyi Zamok and Citadel hills, a new railway station closer to the city center and wide boulevards in the center); regular replanning of parks, merging and increasing the number of green areas; the construction of sports and recreational complexes and objects (stadiums, swimming pools, fountains, playgrounds), museums, churches, markets; construction of new schools and hospitals; the separation of the northwestern industrial zone and of the southern part which would be free of industry; the construction of workers' residential colonies in the north and residential colonies for the elite in the south.

     An important difference between the projects could be seen in a more modest and therefore cheaper scale of transformations suggested by Drexler, a Lviv resident. So, although the work of both authors was later used to create a master plan of the city development, Drexler's more realistic approach was reflected in the plan in a more tangible way. However, due to lack of funds, even the most economical ideas were implemented only by 15%. In the mid-1920s the city renewal was carried out mainly in the form of reconstruction, repair, or completion of existing buildings; it is remarkable that no school was built at that time. From 1927, when the financial condition of the city improved considerably, the implementation of the development plans was gradually started; however, it slowed down again in 1929-1933 due to the global economic crisis. At this stage, the construction of new residential districts was started, including exemplary areas and affordable social housing, some new health-care institutions were built.

     In 1931, in the midst of the economic recession, the city council incorporated the suburbs into the city, thus implementing the most important point of the interwar master plan. Now the development of the city really meant building up a much wider area than before. New districts were to be provided with the same level of infrastructure as Lviv itself within 15 years (Bonusiak, 2000, 31). The author of one of the brochures, published by the city council in 1939, said: "The incorporated communes are populated mostly by poor people; they were suburban areas with no water supply and no sewage, with primitive lighting and  earth roads everywhere, and were considerably different in their appearance from the old city. ... the actual incorporation of the suburbs has not been completed by now and will not be over very soon" (Lwów 1934-39..., 1939, 72). The problem of water supply was among thr most difficult ones, which required the construction of a new water supply system. The issue was extremely acute in the densely populated areas of Klepariv and Zamarstyniv. The ambitious plans to build a new network of roads, highways, and railways in the northern part of Lviv in the last decade before the Second World War were not implemented. The city council only managed to make some point changes. In Zamarstyniv, new public facilities appeared: a building for firefighters, a swimming pool complex, several schools, an exemplary city health and social care center (in the building of the former Juliusz Słowacki school in vul. Zamarstynivska, 132), which also served Klepariv and Male Holosko. Pidzamche was left outside the current city development plans, except for a partial regulation of vul. Poltviana (ul. Pełtewna) in 1930 (Lwów 1934-39..., 1939, 7), though the district was neither an important part of the city nor one of the newly incorporated suburbs. The municipal intervention in the local economy was limited to repairing and renovating important city life facilities like the city slaughterhouse or the building of the railway station "Pidzamche," damaged in time of the war. The renovation of roads and pavements and the construction of new streets and sewage system and electricity supply was made only in certain areas (Lwów 1934-39..., 1939, 72-74). Thus, the ambitious projects of redeveloping Pidzamche in a truly modern district, worked out before the war, were postponed again. First the world war and then the global economic crisis prevented the city from final "civilizing" and regulating its economic "backyard," as was done in contemporary West European cities.

     An important, though isolated, case of developing interwar Pidzamche "from the grass roots" was the construction of the Community workers' house. This large building was built in 1933-1934 due to the efforts of Lviv workers who collected funds among their circle. The house was used both for social activities and for leisure.

     In the interwar period Polish cities' industry was largely dependent on the state interventionism (Saryusz-Zaleski, 1930, 252). Actually, the Polish state did not have any special industrial plans concerning Lviv. All appropriate investments were directed to the so-called Central Industrial District, which did not include Lviv (Богданова, 2004, 171). Accordingly, Lviv's production structure was still limited to usual food and light industries. No new large factories appeared in the territory of Pidzamche, so the industrial development was restricted to small businesses. For example, the roofing felt factory of Kuznicki, the scale factory belonging to brothers Winter, and the meat products factory of Ichnowski, located on vul. Zavodska, the shoe factory "Pallis" on vul. Zhovkivska and the factory of chemicals "Tlenopol" on vul. Horodnytska, the textile factory "Len" on vul. Tkatska (Miller, 2010, 153-154, 159).