On 21 October 2022, the 14th WARSAW IN CONSTRUCTION festival will be launched with the motto ‘Fight for the Streets’. The event is organised by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.

The 14th festival addresses the theme of urban street life, today almost completely dominated by cars. The festival exhibition can be seen from 21 October 2022 to 15 January 2023 at Warsaw’s Museum on the Vistula River at 22 Wybrzeze Kosciuszkowskie.

The title of the exhibition is taken from Janette Sadik-Khan’s book Fighting for the Streets, in which the American urban scholar wrote: ‘The basic principle of traffic organisation has been known for a century and has been ignored by planners until now. It proclaims that the effects depend on what you build. More lanes means more cars”.

As the event’s organisers emphasise, the axis of the WARSAW IN CONSTRUCTION festival is the question of universal street design to make it accessible and friendly to all residents. “Our assumption is that we can all fit on the streets of Warsaw”.

The artworks, films and festival meetings presented at the exhibition will show different aspects of a car-only lifestyle.

“We want this event to become a pretext for discussing the effects of overloading the streets with car traffic. An excellent example of this will be a presentation of the history of Jerozolimskie Avenue, once a lively urban street that today resembles an expressway, which was prepared jointly with the Warsaw Branch of the Polish Architects’ Association”, emphasise the organisers.

The festival audience will visit the tram depot at Kawęczyńska Street, learn about the history of the development of Warsaw’s tram network and the daily work of its operators. The visitors will learn about the results of student research showing that the era of underground passages, getting increasingly buried, is coming to an end and, finally, they will be able to attend film screenings in the “Syrena” cinema.

Adrian Andrzejewski