Lockdown in a disneyfied city: Kraków Old Town and the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic

This paper presents the geography of the historic central district of Kraków, Poland before, during and after the first wave of the 2020 pandemic. It describes how the disneyfied main part of the UNESCO heritage site of universal values turned into a ghost town as functional changes were turning into physical ones amid restrictions. From the results of pre-pandemic processes (that, as we argue, turned the city into its disneyfied version), to the lockdown (that later revealed itself to be but the first one in a row), to the post-lockdown recovery, these changes are presented in modified figure-ground diagrams with accessibility being defined by both tangible and intangible properties. The results are set against the background of the city’s current policies regarding economic recovery, mobility and accessibility to urban green areas. As an attempt to address the present vulnerability of the once resilient historic city centres—of which Kraków Old Town is a luminous example—this paper tends to be a voice in the debate on the post-2020 planning and the strategies we will need to face the subsequent waves of this, or other, pandemics as well as consequences of climate change.

On the spontaneous beauty of cities: neither design nor chaos

A clear bridge connecting the theory of spontaneous order and the issue of beauty in and for cities has not yet been developed. After a general exploration of the concept of beauty, this article builds an alternative idea of beauty, namely, beauty as spontaneity. In particular, it argues that beauty in the urban realm greatly depends on forms and orders that can hardly be comprehensively designed but rather emerge as the result of the freedom granted to multiple urban agents to express themselves in space. In this article the works of Jacobs and Romano are analysed and explored. Starting from some of their main ideas, the paper suggests certain planning and design tactics to nurture this kind of beauty and provides some essential ethical principles.