No Country(side) for Old Men?
Landscape Restructuring and the Emergence of New Actors in Post-Socialist, Rural Areas since 1991. A Case Study from Southern Poland.
Joanna Rozmus1; 1 University of Vienna/HSE Nizhny Novgorod, Austria
Discussion
The nation-wide liquidation of state farms, the restoration of private property rights and the inflow of foreign investments entailed enormous change with diverse territorial impact. In certain rural areas, former state farm land has become a terrain of competition for global players since 1991. In this paper, I focus on the continuities of power relations and the way of making business in the Polish countryside. I take the village of Paczółtowice (35 km northwest of Cracow) as case example for a post-socialist village with tangible changes since the 1990s. Its former state farm land underwent a radical transformation from an agricultural space to a recreational space of business meetings and international sports tournaments, to Kraków Valley Golf & Country Club – a global encounter of international golf players, businessmen, wealthy city residents and Paczółtowians/country dwellers. I argue that the multilayered interweaving of new and old power relations gets blurred by conventional turning dates like 1989. The “new” way of making business and the relation of powerful, rural institutions does not mean a breakup with common habits before 1989, but a continuity of old structures amplified with new practices and forms of knowledge.
