A City Reframed : Managing Warsaw in the 1990's

The specificity of the Warsaw picture is its demand for "reframing" and numerous and varied attempts have been made to achieve a "change of frame". This text reports on the study exploring organising processes in their local context.

Management of big cities is a relatively unresearched area, as compared to city planning and city governance. A study of Warsaw city management reveals the transformation process typically found in European countries in political and economic transition. In A City Reframed, Czarniawska conceptualises city management as an "action-net" under transformation, where three types of action are in focus: "muddling through", or coping with daily problems; "reframing", or changing the frame of interpretation of the world in order to take successful action; and "anchoring", the testing of new ideas on potentially involved parties in order to secure cooperation or minimize resistance. "Muddling through" is central to management in Warsaw, as it no doubt has always been: it is this "muddling through" that makes cities function. The specificity of the Warsaw picture is its demand for "reframing" and numerous and varied attempts have been made to achieve a "change of frame". They were sometimes successful, sometimes not, the skill of anchoring only slowly emerging from the most recent past, with the sediments of the old regimes an obvious obstacle. The study pinpoints the phenomena central to the construction of the action-net of city management, and traces its further connections (or lack of such), both temporally and spatially.