Urban Planning and Municipal Governance in a Period of Rapid Change:A Frontier Town in Russian Poland at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Rapid industrial growth in the early twentieth century, linked to the construction of railways, transformed Kalisz, located on the western edge of Russian Poland. In Urban Planning and Municipal Governance in a Period of Rapid Change: A Frontier Town in Russian Poland at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, Makary Górzyński examines how Kalisz's projects for new infrastructure and public services were thwarted by Russian Poland's inefficient municipal governance system. Górzyński describes the emergence of modern urban planning discussions among the elites of Kalisz, who debated the political, legal, and social dimensions of industrial urbanization in Russian Poland. This emerging discourse ascribed the industrial city's suburbanization and ad hoc architecture to the conflictual social conditions in which Polish, Jewish, German, and Russian communities coexisted and competed. Urban planning initiatives and new theories of town management and construction developed from the urban politics of this multiethnic Polish city under Russian rule.