Crises create favorable conditions to search for a new place and role for culture in cities. Is culture just an excessive burden for their lean budgets, or can it help them get out of the basement?

Creative city focuses on attracting and keeping creative inhabitants. Putting people over capital is significant and may serve as a starting point for building more inclusive urban strategies.

An Interview with Benjamin Barber by Maciej NowickiNation-states are an abstraction. They have anthems and flags but the city is the place where we live. Nobody lives in Poland or the Czech Republic but in Warsaw, krakow, Prague or Ostrava—says Benjamin Barber in conversation with Maciej Nowicki.

The idea of creative cities – still a current hot topic in urban studies—is increasingly confronted with the notion of smart cities. Both concepts reflect frantic attempts to answer the questions, what is a city and what should a city become in the post-industrial era.

Żyrardów, a town with forty thousand inhabitants in central Poland, which grew around the local textile factory in mid-19th century, owes its name to its first director, inventor of the flax spinning frame, Philippe de Girard. Over time, when the factory was bought by two German businessmen from northern Bohemia, the mill grew to gigantic…

Hans-Peter Schwarz: Helmut Kohl. Eine politische Biographie. DVA- Sachbuch, 2012.

Igor Janke: “Napastnik. Opowieść o Viktorze Orbánie”. [A striker. A story of Viktor Orbán], Demart, Warszawa 2012.

Emmanuel Carrere, Limonov, translated by Magdalena kamińska-Maurugeon, Wydawnictwo Literackie 2012.

Robert D. kaplan Monsun. Ocean Indyjski i przyszłość amerykańskiej dominacji (Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power), Czarne 2012.

Paul Wilson, Bohemian Rhapsodies, Torst 2012; Madeleine Albrightová, Pražská zima, Argo 2012 The questions: “What is a nation? Who belongs to it?” are so much more than just a matter of definition. It would be neither hard nor unfair to demonstrate the strong correlation between an intensive character of the definition and the number, scope…

Geography I like to look at maps. I like to plan trips that, for the most part, I never take. Because I’ve made so many plans, the map of the world is seared into my brain and there is no longer any need for me to physically look at it. And this is what I…

Will we ever live to see the formation of a European identity? Is there a way of speeding up this moment? While this might seem a rather abstract, or ivory tower, pseudo-intellectual subject that is of lesser importance and urgency than, for example, pointing out who in Europe is sponging on whom, sooner or later…

One of the poorest countries in the world became an economic superpower in two generations.

During the current crisis, Austria is faring better than most other developed economies. Why is that?

For the Baltic nations, introducing the common currency is the easiest way of forging closer ties with an integrated Europe and, more broadly, with Western civilization.

In Europe, large-scale shale gas production can first be expected in Russia, France and Great Britain. The oil and gas industry in Poland and in other states in the region still operates according to the rules known from the epoch of real-socialism.

Imagine the following picture. Far, far away in the distant galaxy a group of amused aliens sit in front of their TV. The evening’s highlight is a live broadcast via the Intergalactic Internet from an exotic distant planet called Earth. The TV shows the dramatic end of a remarkable experiment in a small but self-important…

The political changes in a remote Asian country, larger than France and England put together, may alter the balance of power on the geopolitical chessboard.