Łódź – miasto przemysłowe, miasto nowoczesne?
Łódź – An Industrial City, a Modern City?

Author(s): Kamil Śmiechowski
Subject(s): Cultural history, Local History / Microhistory
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
Keywords: Łódź; urbanity; modernization; modernity; 19th century; 20th century
Summary/Abstract: The text is an attempt to answer the question to what extent industrial Łódź was a modern city. The author draws attention to the ambiguity of the term modernity itself, then emphasizes that the development of the city itself was the result of the modernization project of the authorities of the Congress Kingdom. He emphasizes, however, that the project was not warmly welcomed by the Polish public, and the city was perceived as alien and sinister. He tries to explain this phenomenon by emphasizing the ambivalence of the development of Łódź, in which rapid economic growth did not go hand in hand with the development of education or public services. By analyzing the testimonies of people from different social classes, he shows how differently this city was perceived and assessed depending on the place in the social hierarchy that each person occupied. Constituting a terra incognito for the educated and wealthy layers of society, it was a place of enormous emancipation and social advancement for working women. This promotion brought greater benefits than the risks associated with staying in a big city, where exploitation and other negative phenomena to which these classes were exposed were common. In the author's opinion, the ambivalence of Łódź's development was most visible in the sphere of culture, where the opinion of the elites about Łódź as a cultural desert went hand in hand with the real achievements of the city's inhabitants in the field of culturalization. An emanation of this phenomenon was the creation in the city of one of the first collections of modern art in Europe. In conclusion, the author argues that the case of industrial Łódź says a lot about modernity in Central and Eastern Europe and its asynchronous character.

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