Aleksandra Turowska

Poland’s accession to the EU exponentially increased the mobility of its citizens and changed the geography of Polish migration to Western Europe. Poles go abroad to improve their livelihoods: to work, earn competitive wages, and to study. Post-accession migrants hail mainly from small communities. The paper is based on empirical research in a small community of Wronka in the West Pomeranian Voivodship. The goal of this case study was to reconstruct the history of labour mobility of Wronka’s residents, identify migration paths of their families, and analyse the effects of labour migration on the sending community. Departing from the customary analytical lens, this study analyses Polish mobility from the point of view of the sending, not the destination community. In the context of Wronka, mobility has become the norm in this previously immobile community centred around the state-owned farm, and appears to be a strategy used to cope with social, economic, and political change.

The paper aims to consider how, since the early 1990s, the city space of Kazan is shaped by different social actors. This paper assumes that a key influence on the process of social production of space in Kazan was the procedure of gaining autonomy after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the lo­cal variant of economic transformation into the global market system. From the beginning of the post-socialist transition, elites’ strategies were related to the politics of memory and the ideas of mul­ticulturalism and federalism. Consequently, Kazan underwent the process of reinventing of urban identity, and indigenization (by Hughes [2007] it was called Tatarazing) of city space. In the capital of Tatarstan the financialization of city space, accumulation through expropriation, and develop­ment by megaevents can be observed. Strategies of development enforced by elites are contested by city inhabitants and grassroots initiatives concentrated around the protection of architectural heritage. Centralized and hierarchical power in Tatarstan makes the grassroots initiatives’ demands possible by a collaboration with local elites.

* This paper was created as a result of a research project entitled “Social Construction of Space: Anthropological Study of City-Forming Practices in Kazan” numbered 2017/27/N/HS3/02046 funded by the National Science Centre in Poland.