Interpreting Contrasts of the Post-Industrial City: The Example of Lodz
Paulina Tobiasz-Lis, Marcin Wójcik

Abstract
Lodz – the third largest city in Poland in terms of its population, frequently referred to as “Polish Manchester”, used to be the biggest hub of textile industry in eastern Europe at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The structure of the city, shaped to a large extent in that period, was preserved after World War II by the socialist socioeconomic system. However, irrespective of the political system, the city always had a markedly industrial economic structure and was characterized by strong social and spatial disproportions. Following a difficult period of the 1990s, the processes of transformations planned before have only recently begun to occur in Lodz. The nature of these changes is attributed to the fact that the development of the areas of growth under new conditions is a comparatively young phenomenon, while the areas of marginalization continue a certain path which has been present in Lodz for many decades. All of this makes the city of Lodz a fascinating research area in which disproportions occur in a microscale, i.e. in the social environment of both those who have won and those who have lost the process of political and economic transformation. The aim of this article is identifying and interpreting the disproportions in the urban space of Lodz from a perspective of individual experience with the use of photo projective method.

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