Wishes

In 2026, over five autumn days during the 14th edition of the MIASTOmovie City and Architecture Film Festival, we’ll be performing a concert of urban WISHES for you. We’re not promising that this hasn’t been done before – because it has. And more than once. But what has come of it? Unfortunately, still very little. And we, thanks to our compilation of seven hits, want to change that. And we hope that all our wishes, like any decent banger, will move you and spur you into action.

Thirteen previous editions of the festival mean dozens of film screenings. They also mean countless conversations and debates on the topics that mattered in a given year: the challenges bound up with changes to the space around us and to the communities that inhabit it; the everyday problems we encounter living in cities; forecasts of crises that may be coming. In every screening and every meeting over the years, we have looked together with you for diagnoses, for inspiration, but also for hope for the future and proposals for change. We have gathered longings, dreams and ideas about the kind of life we want in our cities, and the kind of architecture and space we want to live it in. We have built up quite a store — now it is time to do something with it!

During the 14th edition we will set out for you our list of seven wishes for cities: wishes that have been recurring for years in publications, in discussions and in documentary films. We will give examples showing that fulfilling them, even on a small scale, is possible — because wishes are the driving force behind action. We will also look at their ambiguity. In Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, a book iconic for the beginnings of urban movements and for our own work as MIASTOmovie, David Harvey points to the opportunities, but also the dangers, that their fulfilment may bring.

We refuse to sink into a crisis of imagination and into the Fisherian "slow cancellation of the future" that accompanies so much reflection on the present. We draw on the philosopher Ernst Bloch's thought that "one has to learn to hope" (and it is never a finished process). And we promise to guard against wishful thinking, while remaining attentive to the responsibility that comes with the dreams we voice and to the motives that stand behind them.

Seven wishes

In each of the films we present, we will look for the wishes expressed in them and for the routes towards making them real. We may well fail to resist nostalgia and find ourselves admiring intriguing solutions from the past — but only in order to believe in the effectiveness of visions and projects that, at the time they were conceived, seemed impossible to put into practice. We will lean our thinking gently towards the future, without losing touch with the present. Our work on the programme has been accompanied by reflection on the following seven threads — seven wishes.

Moderation

The Anthropocene, still present in how we think about reality, turns our attention towards humanity's irreversible interference in the substance of our planet. The excessive extraction of raw materials and the release of harmful substances into the environment are also consequences of what we do in architecture and construction. "Less waste" means not only sorting rubbish and reusing everyday products, but also reusing the building materials left behind by demolitions, natural disasters and wartime destruction. Recycling concrete and metal, and recovering structural as well as decorative elements, has been done in the past too — usually out of necessity (rubble concrete, brick) or as an experiment. So we have both the knowledge and the technology. For several years now we have been wishing — above all on behalf of designers, planners and investors — for a turn away from further extraction and the production of new materials, and for moderation as an everyday habit of thought. And for greater faith in durability: in buildings that have been with us for years and should not vanish in the pursuit of modernised space, and in ideas grounded in reuse. Wishes are wishes, of course, and we are aware that a moment comes when we have to answer the question: what, in fact, are we permitted to do when adapting older architecture to new functions? We will come down to the level of everyday renovation practice and share actions in the spirit of moderation that are within reach of every one of us.

Beauty

What are our ideas of beauty in architecture — the beauty we still want so badly in Polish cities? Behind the term there often hides a wish for prestige, manifested in monumental edifices, historicising buildings, or concrete developer housing clad in polystyrene rustication. We probably all thought we were somewhere else entirely by now, given that not so long ago we were seeking beauty in simplicity and usefulness. As it turns out, the Polish manor house has never left us. For the full picture of our dreams, we will go back to the post-war years, when the historical costume disappeared from representative spaces in the name of modernisation and modernity. We will examine the ways in which architecture has been separated from mere building, as an emanation of the dichotomies beautiful–ugly, exceptional–ordinary. Perhaps we will also manage to trace how architecture deemed beautiful has, over the years, supported the image of cities worth visiting precisely for the presence of particular buildings.

Community

Periods of temporary isolation and the migration of interaction into the virtual world are reflected in regularly published research on the rise of loneliness, of mental health crises, and of the inability to establish direct contact. Well-designed cities are a natural space for interaction between people and for building community: conversations in courtyards, encounters in shop queues, chats in neighbourhood cafés or on walks in the park. We are beginning to co-create multigenerational tenement houses, themed co-housing schemes and housing co-operatives — even if for now these are isolated projects and concepts. We decide to share, and to occupy imperfect buildings, in the face of crisis: high prices on the housing market, or a shortage of premises for creative work. During the festival we will reach back into the history of housing co-operatives in other European countries. We will consider what stands in the way of Polish co-operatives developing, and what potential this solution holds. We will ask ourselves what follows from the decision to share space — a kitchen, a bathroom, a living room — with people we do not know. We are curious about the values and ideals behind the turn away from "self care" towards "community care" in the communities that form through living together.

Safety

The closer to our borders armed conflicts unfold, the harder we look for a sense of safety. Not in the predictability of our daily lives or in the relationships we have with those closest to us, but in stable structures: the walls of our homes, the ceilings of potential shelters. We rehearse various scenarios; we look for information about procedures, support institutions and places we can go to. We can see how geopolitical instability changes which forgotten structures interest us again — canopies jutting out of lawns, white markings on façades, have become legible once more. We will try to define what a sense of safety can mean for us in particular types of building, where it is produced and how it materialises. We will look at extreme cases of the belief that only matter can guarantee us refuge. And we will track down the troubling instances of turbo-privatisation that surface in the face of threat, and of space used as a tool of social segregation.

Greenery

After a week in steel-and-glass office blocks, on concrete squares and among the asphalt roads to and from work — what do we dream of? Increasingly, of dropping everything and escaping to the Bieszczady mountains (or, closer to Wrocław, the Karkonosze). And if all we have is a free afternoon? We go to the park or a suburban wood, to the river embankments or the nearest rubble hill. We look for greenery — and better still, for wildness. We fight for every tree in an inner-city courtyard, every shrubby little square, every unmown lawn. After years of taming and fencing off, we want to reclaim greenery for everyone in equal measure. We wish for urban enclaves in which to rest. The many awards given in recent years to Polish landscape architecture practices, and to architects who successfully weave greenery into their projects, would seem to confirm this. Their work strengthens the sense that our cities are finally managing not only to halt "concretosis", but even to appreciate ruderal vegetation and native species. How large is that scale in reality, and are these high-profile cases not covering up the sad truth that we still lose more trees than we manage to save? We will look at the way greenery is being marketised today — used to raise the value of investments rather than the quality of life of the people who use them. We will also talk about landscape, to which we turn ever more often in moments of crisis. What does it symbolise? What values does it carry, values that feel close to us in a post-pandemic reality?

Health

We also know by now that a happy city is a city offering a high quality of life — regardless of age or ability. The debate about accessibility, urban public services and care for the well-being of residents has been rolling through urban discourse for years. With each passing year these challenges will sound louder: the demographic forecasts are not optimistic, and our society is ageing. Quality of life is precisely where cities will compete. We will consider how architecture and our surroundings can help us look after our health and our sense of well-being, and how the influence of architecture and urban planning on social well-being might be studied. We will also find out whether the design process leaves room for reflection on how a building can lengthen our lives or support recovery — not only physical, but mental too. Let us trace together the simple, common methods used for centuries, but let us also reach for modern, experiment-based solutions that improve the quality of our functioning in the city.

All our wishes coming true

We already have plenty of urban wishes, and weighty ones at that, so — to keep from losing heart — at the end of our greatest-hits trail we will look for ways of making all our dreams come true. We will reach back to revolutionary times, seething with the ideals of the youth rebellion of 1968. Adventure, experiment, participation and prefabrication — the values and practices of designers in the 1970s — made it possible to materialise wishes (in the form of single- and multi-family houses) that those around them regarded as frivolous projections or utopias. Returning to the beginning, to the motivations that guided us in shaping this edition, we will pinpoint specific moments in history, and cases still present in space today, when what had been imagined became real. Wishes came true and turned into everyday life.

As the MIASTOmovie team, we have a wish of our own: that this next edition of our festival, by using film as a tool for shifting perspective, will challenge the fatalistic — and, it seems, dominant — narratives about the future of cities. And that it will give us hope that "dreams are a map to a better world"!