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Sustaining Hope

"Modernization is our only hope for the future" says Hanna Kaptur, small, energetic woman in her late 40s, the principal of primary school No.1 in Zgierz, town of about 60 000 in the very center of Poland. Her school, build in early '60s, is literally falling apart: the roof over gymnasium leaks after heavy rain, the wind is blowing easily through all the windows and energy performance factor, to be displayed on every public building from the beginning of 2006, must be several times more than the requirements.

And there is one more reason Ms. Kaptur is praying for realisation of sustainable development school renovation project, prepared with use of Norwegian Foreign Ministry funds: she hopes to change the name of the school patron. The current one, Ludwik Warynski, founder of XIX-century socialist party "Proletaryat", was so revered in pre-1989 Poland that his face was present on most popular banknotes. Now, after super inflation period and democratic changes, portrait of his bearded face looks sadly on Zgierz's school wall. "We cannot afford to change also all Warynski's seals, forms and address labels" the principal explains. And she suggests that a new patron may be somebody totally different, for instance former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, the mother of sustainable development concept.



To much of a foreigner surprise the idea of sustainable development has no good connotations in contemporary Poland. However it has been present in article 5 of the Constitution adopted in 1997 ("The Republic of Poland shall safeguard . the protection of the natural environment pursuant to the principles of sustainable development), it is difficult to find the examples of practicing it. Even in the capital, hour and half drive from Zgierz, there are only two of them: the new library of Warsaw University and the Supreme Court building, both designed by architecture professor Marek Budzynski. When visiting him in Ursynow part of Warsaw, one can see the third example of this concept, conspicuously hidden from outsiders view: the large courtyard full of trees, bushes, small pond, benches for elders and playing ground for kids. The flats' prices in four-stores concrete buildings surrounding it are the highest in all Ursynow, where 100 000 inhabitants live. This is the proof that for such design people are voting with their money. Oddly enough, when they represent power and decide in others' name, they think differently.

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