ABSTRACT
Lodz is a city of contrasts and enormous recent changes which challenge a conventional linear reading of space, place and the environment. It is simultaneously provincial and outward-looking, solidly socialist and loudly entrepreneurial, sedate and brashly postmodern. The two-hour journey by road from Warsaw begins on a fast dual-carriageway but somewhere in the middle slows down to a gentle ride over undulating countryside and through small quiet towns. The central bus and rail station is almost quaintly dilapidated. The surrounding old town is four-storey, grey and spacious, suggesting a disciplined opulence now disappeared, a cityscape occupied by what seem to be mostly solitary individuals with dogs, made small yet dignified by an urban scale of an unhurried, half-empty, quiet magnificence not quite realized. This sensation is soon shattered. The single main street is a brightly-lit buzz of youthful commerce which terminates at one end in an American-style shopping strip. The middle ring-road is a congested circle of hypermarkets and new industrial premises surrounded by the mass-housing estates and bucolic allotments of the socialist period. Further out still are new residential districts of the nouveau riche. Where not long ago the second language was Russian, many people on the street now have a smattering of English.
