How “Poland Entered Europe”

Abstract

The article surveys a giant infrastructural construction project in Poland: the A2 motorway, connecting Poznan´ and Warsaw with the Polish-German border. It was the first private motorway in Poland, and the biggest European infrastructural project, and was realized in a public-private partnership system. The last section of A2 was opened on 1 December 2011, which can be seen as a key moment in Polish socioeconomic transformation. I examine it on two levels: (1) a discourse between government and private investors in which the motorway was the medium of economic and social development and infrastructural “the end” modernization of Poland; (2) practices and opinions of local communities, living along the new motorway. On the first level, the construction of A2 was seen as an impetus for the economic and social development of the regions where the motorway was built. But on the second level, I observe almost universal disappointment and a deep crisis experienced by local economies.

Tripe Soup at the Service Area: Thoughts on an Infrastructure of Meaningful Sociality

“…However, this understanding of service areas has itself recently undergone some changes. For example, Giulio Giovannoni (2016) describes those along Italian highways as meeting places and subcultural spaces, while Waldemar Kuligowski and Agata Stanisz concede that the habitual performances of drivers allow for a critical reflection on modernisation processes (Kuligowski and Stanisz 2015;Kuligowski 2019). Their contributions also pave the way for a more sense-oriented approach, which has been applied in the broad field of mobility studies but not in the context of petrol stations and service areas, 'meaningful sociality'.…”