Warsaw and Its Land: Property Rights on Urban Land in Transition

[摘要] By tracing the history of urban land reforms in Warsaw from the end of WWI till today, this article contributes to the ongoing debate on the reprivatization of pre-WWII properties in Warsaw. For more than 30 years, this debate has been shaped by a biased assumption that the Bierut Decree — the law that enabled the communalization of urban land in post-WWII Warsaw — was informed by the communist ideology. Based on new archival evidence from Zürich, we support the recent claim by Małgorzata Popiołek-Roßkamp that the Bierut Decree was shaped to a significant extent by the Swiss architect and urban planner Hans Bernoulli and is deeply rooted in the European land-reform movements of the early 20th century. Taking several case studies as examples, we illustrate how the unregulated process of property reprivatization in Warsaw under the Third Polish Republic (i.e., since 1989) has reintroduced the problems of urban development similar to those that the land reform proposed by Bernoulli almost a century ago was supposed to fix. We discuss reprivatization from the perspective of economic value creation and argue that the communalization of urban land in Warsaw was a unique policy achievement even though most of its groundbreaking propositions remained unrealized.

[学科分类] 内科医学

[关键词] Bierut Decree;Hans Bernoulli;land reform;communalization;reprivatization;liberal socialism