A few interestng articles :
Strange map of investments
Kupieckie Domy Towarowe (KDT) and the
entertainment center MarcPol situated on pl.
Defilad, near the Modern Art Museum, as well
as a forest of skyscrapers – this is what the city
center may look like.
The area between ul. Królewska, Grzybowska, al. Jana Pawła II,
Wspólna, pl. Trzech Krzyży and Nowy Świat
could house buildings with a surface space of
around 1.7 million square meters.
Some 0.5 million square meters are already either being
built or are in the process of advanced
preparations. All this in spite of the fact that the
whole large area in the very center of Warsaw has
no land development plan. We are now observing
a dangerous precedent. The architectural study of
real estate investments in the city center, prepared
by Jakub Wacławek and Grzegorz Stiasny, is
not only a catalogue of property developers’ plans
– sometimes very controversial – but is also a hint
as to where one could squeeze in one more
building. For instance, in the competition for the
development of Pasaż Wiecha a design was
chosen, which envisages converting the current
car park in front of the National Concert Hall into
a square. Meanwhile, Wacławek and Stiasny
suggest in this place a large building. Stiasny and
Wacławek try to squeeze in more and more new
buildings wherever possible.
Gazeta Wyborcza Feb. 08, 2006, Stołeczna
Warszawa: National Stadium – now or never
Colliers International, in cooperation with
partners associated with the Warsaw Destination
Alliance, has prepared the design of a conference
center integrated with a football stadium.
The object would allow for organizing international
commercial events and conferences, as well as
sports events.
The conference center will have a
capacity of 15,000, and the stadium of 45,000.
They will also house exhibition halls, a regional
promotion center, museum of the Polish
community, and probably also a shopping gallery
with over 100 stores on 25,000 square meters of
surface space. The designers are also thinking
about an oceanarium.
The cost of the whole
investment was estimated at around 500 million
euro, including EUR 250 million for the
conference center and another EUR 120 million
for an open stadium or EUR 240 million for a
roofed over one. According to Alex Kloszewski,
president at Warsaw Destination Alliance, the
conference center itself will attract events worth
35-40 million euros a year. The whole city
(stores, hotels, communication etc.) will generate
revenues of some 300 million euro a year. The
completion time of the conference center is
between 24 and 36 months, and in case of the
stadium it may even be 45 months. Three
locations are taken into account, each of them
guaranteeing that the center could be further
developed in the future. Two of the locations are
owned by the city. The plot should be around 35
hectares large, and should have access to
communication infrastructure, including railway
and the underground. Alex Kloszewski hopes the
city will make a contribution in the form of a plot
of land. The investment could be party financed
by a bonds issue or by a special tax for Warsaw
sector companies, which will profit most from the
construction of the center.
Reviving Warsaw
Chief Architect of Warsaw Michał Borowski has plans
to turn city center into a vibrant commercial and cultural
hub. He talked with PM’sEwan Jones about how
to materialize the best of them in foreseeable future.
Jones: Many people have complained
for a long time that Warsaw has no real
center in the way that cities like Kraków
have. Is that situation set to change?
Borowski: To compare Warsaw with
Kraków is pointless—Kraków was not
destroyed during the war, Kraków was not
destroyed by communists. So what do we
have in Warsaw? The whole idea of the new
city plan is focused on a number of important
issues. The first one is to recreate
Marszałkowska and Jerozolimskie—
because those two streets are, let’s say
destroyed a little bit, by the plans for Plac
Defilad and we have to recreate those two
streets, and I think it’s extremely important.
An overall plan for all those streets is,
often, much more important than what
kind of buildings we are building inside the
whole area. Second is to create a big public
square surrounded by buildings which are
not only commercial. We cannot have a
city center with only kebabs and clothes
and fast food—we need something else. So
we plan to build a museum of modern art,
and opposite it, on the other side of the
square, we are planning a musical theater.
There are a number of potential investors
and also some operators interested in taking
part in developing this project.
Jones: Are there concrete plans yet for
the museum of modern art?
Borowski:Yes, an international competition
will be announced in the next two to
three weeks. There is an agreement
between the mayor and the minister of culture,
there is also the intentional decision
of the city council. The city is constructing
the building and the state will finance and
manage the exhibition—more or less. It
should be a major, high class international
competition and I think that at the end of
next year we will have the result of it and
the year after, that we will start construction.
It will be about 35,000 square meters
of gross area.
Jones: Where will the money come
from?
Borowski: These two projects—the
museum and theater—are the only two
projects where the city will be involved as
an investor; the rest are commercial buildings,
and the way of choosing investors is of
course tendering, either for perpetual lease
or tendering for shares in a company or
companies armed with those sites. […]
This is an investment of, I would say EUR
1.5bn. Of this, the city has to invest maybe 5
percent and the rest [will come] from private
investment.
[...] Warsaw is a very, very rich city, even if
you can not see it when you take a walk
around the street. Warsaw city has assets
worth around PLN 100bn and debt of
maybe no more than about PLN 2bn. So we
have a debt which is maybe 2 percent of the
market value of our assets, so it’s an
extremely good situation. Like a lot of other
conditions, Warsaw has great potential for
growth, but there are of course a number of
problems, and the biggest problem is the
quality of management in the public
sphere, which is dramatically bad, not
modern, not developed, and not transformed
like the economy has been over the
last fifteen years.
Jones: It has been said that in order to
work effectively with the private sector,
city authorities need to change the way
they work…
Borowski: The center of Warsaw reflects
the rest of the economy and the process of
transition, and a great deal has been
achieved to date. The transformation of the
economy has been carried out. The transformation
of the political system has been
done. The transformation of management
within the public sector has almost started.
All the problems regarding the city center
reflect problems within the public sector.
In my eyes, the biggest problem is that
since 1989 a lot of things have been transformed,
but the public sector has been left
alone. We cannot have a situation whereby
the people responsible for ruling the city
are earning little money. For example the
mayor of Warsaw, responsible for everything
and with executive power comparable
with that of the prime minister’s, is
making PLN 12,000 gross per month, and
that is it! Maybe for politicians this amount
is enough, because those politicians also
have other ambitions, they have a mission,
they have a lot of things on their agenda.
But directors, who are doing this job, they
cannot do it right for that little. If you are
trying to hire let’s say… the most painful
position here is to be responsible for roads.
Let’s pay him PLN 8,000. What do you get
in return?
Jones: There have been many plans
for Warsaw city center before, yet none
of them have been realized. Is the current
project going to bear fruit and, if
so, when is work likely to commence?
Borowski: The first thing to be mentioned
in any explanation of why the situation
is the way it is, is that the urban
planning of Warsaw has been
changed at least three times since
1989. Warsaw was divided into eight,
and later 13, independent boroughs,
or communities. Finally, in 2002,
Parliament forced all those communities
to be one city again. And
since 2003, we have had the Mayor
of Warsaw, chosen by public elections,
and we also have one city
administration, which is extremely
important. So this an explanation
why those plans started by national
competition in 1992 were not effected
in any sense. Since I started here,
which was August 2003, we have
transformed this plan in order to
make it possible to execute. So now
we have a situation where we have
the proposal of a city plan—this city
plan is a local law I expect to be
accepted by the city council at the
beginning of next year—it has
passed all formalities and the only
remaining step is that the mayor has to ask
the city council to accept it, that’s all. So,
we can count on the new city plan being
accepted, formally, by the city council and
the Mazowsze government from the
beginning of next year. This is the first,
absolutely necessary step.
Then the real situation is that such a big
project, of such complexity needs management.
The city, as it is today, has no
ability to manage by itself—it’s too big, too
complicated and too difficult. There is a
decision to buy these services and the
project management for the whole area
will be the subject of a public tender. We
have money for it and I think that within
two months I will buy those services for
project management externally. Having
the city plan, and having the organization
to manage all the problems, we can now
go further. We have problems with legal
title to land. As you may know well, there
are a number of claims, and these have to
be solved too.
Jones: In terms of other infrastructure,
such as water and sewage, is central
Warsaw equipped to cope with
increased development? What changes
to the road and transport systems will
be needed?
Borowski: There is sewage, there is
water, there is electricity, there is gas;
whatever you want, so it is not a big deal
and there are not any big needs of any
extreme investment. Like in the whole of
Warsaw, we have a lot of reserves in terms
of power, gas and water in the central part
of the city; it’s not a big deal.
Communication is another story of
course—we have those roads we have and
we have ten times more cars than
we had in 1985. We cannot extend
those roads; all solutions must be
based on the construction of ringroads.
If we don’t construct ringroads,
we will have traffic jams 24
hours a day instead of two hours a
day.
Warsaw is growing—rapidly
and uncontrolled, unplanned.
Statistics tell us that we have 1.7 million
inhabitants. There is a “dark
number” of around 200,000 people
who are living in Warsaw but are
not registered. Then we have commuters
who commute from the
surroundings, so this means that
the city is round about two million.
The average capital in Europe has
roughly 10 percent of the population
of the country—Warsaw has 5
percent.
According all research, about two
million people are dreaming of moving to
Warsaw any day, from the lot of Poland,
because of work and also because it’s
exciting—the future is in Warsaw.
We
could have 3.5 million inhabitants within
25 to 30 years.
The city is growing and the
biggest problem is transportation. What
does that mean for us? It means that we
have to use the structural funds from
Brussels and also money from the city, and
regional money and state money to invest
in infrastructure, in particular in roads and
also in public transportation—this is the
most important thing, everything else will
be solved.
Today Warsaw city is investing
about PLN 2bn in infrastructure, or about
EUR 500m. My guess would be that no
later than within five years it could be ten
times more.
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