“Powrotnicy” in Socjopercepcja debate

A few words from the author about her book: „In the middle of 2018, the first suburban homes that I saw were in a village south of Wrocław. They had tarps saying <<for sale>> hanging on them in plain sight. I saw properties with empty driveways, outside blinds shut and gardens missing rattan furniture and umbrellas.

I was aware that for over 20 years the suburban neighborhoods have been developing without any disturbance. Loose treatment of spatial planning frameworks, weak housing policy and price dynamics of houses were only favoring this process. So did the cultural norm, which says that having your own house is exceptionally important.

The number of people that wanted to live outside of the city, regardless of their complex motivation, and did not regret their choice has been growing each year and it continues to do so. At the same time, I was hearing stories from people who decided to abandon their suburban house and return to the city to live in the city center areas. Those are the returners, and this book is about them. It’s also about their experience of living in the suburbs, moving back to the city and making themselves at home once again. It’s about the strategies of dealing with obstacles when it’s too early to move and trying to make sense of wasting hours on commuting. About the painful disillusion with the environmental disaster of the suburbs, and about the hardships of being a suburban mother. About the house which was supposed to be the family nest and ended up being a source of worries and a dead weight impossible to carry. About the economical and status priviledge of buying yourself out from an address which stops to suit preferred lifestyle. But it is also about finding happiness in the city. The reclaimed spontaneity and freedom from commute. About catching up to what was lost in social relationships and about building a sense of independence and social and civil involvement because of the new place of residence. About how changing your address can change your life.

It seemed to me that I wanted to live in a house in the suburbs. I used to hear this sentence sometimes, spoken with a hint of disappointment, when I was conducting pilot research on the quality of life in the suburbs, a decade after the first attempts at investigating the Polish suburbs.

After hearing this sentence, an idea to take a closer look at members of households who first embody the desire to move, then act upon it and become part of the back-to-the-city movement, was born. This idea sounded interesting, as previous research on residential mobility from a sociological perspective did not take the phenomenon of returning from the suburbs under consideration. Return migration from suburbs to cities can be treated as a partial sign of reurbanization, which is analized by tracking the changes of quality of the housing at the suburbs-city centre line. This analysis is conducted from the perspective of synchronous urbanization and the dominating suburbanization trends in the city region.

Dr hab. Katarzyna Kajdanek, prof. UWr, works at the Department of Urban and Rural Sociology. She is interested in residential mobility processes and various co-occuring signs of urbanization, consistently including them in the framework of sociological terms. She utilizes qualitative methods and approaches during the stages of collecting and analysing data. Language is an important tool in her work, as she emphasizes in her newest book that academic texts are rarely beautiful and tender, which robs them of their power of influence outside of academia. „Powrotnicy” (Zakład Wydawniczy NOMOS, 2022) sum up another stage of the author’s reflection upon the processes of urbanization and act as an introduction to the issue of selective reurbanization analised with the use of life course perspective concept. 

Paweł Klimczak (student of English Studies at the University of Wrocław) as part of the translation practice.