Network of public spaces for all generations at the central metro stations in Warsaw.
A group of architects, sports enthusiasts and social researchers delivered a network of public spaces friendly to all generations of users at the Warsaw's transport hubs. The inclusive, bottom-up process took over a decade, but the result transformed the culture of physical activity in Warsaw and beyond. The network clearly demonstrates the impact of inclusive design and the importance of improving usually neglected spaces around transport hubs, populated by millions of pedestrians every month.
Local
Poland
Warsaw
Mainly urban
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
No
No
Yes
2022-07-21
As a representative of an organisation
Name of the organisation(s): Fundacja Skwer Sportów Miejskich Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Grzegorz Last name of representative: Gadek Gender: Male Nationality: Poland Function: Co-founder Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Nowy Swiat 33/13 Town: Warsaw Postal code: 00-029 Country: Poland Direct Tel:+48 606 282 202 E-mail:grzegorz.gadek@skwer.eu Website:http://www.skwer.eu
This project tells a story about the value of inclusive design process and quality public space. We show how building spaces supporting various physical activities at the transportation hubs leads to positive outcomes for all generations, at scale. It took over a decade from idea to completion, so it is a story about persistence as well.
The result of the project is a network of three public spaces at the central part of Warsaw’s metro lines - the interchange station and two others, located respectively in the City Hall and the riverbank area. Over 2 million people entered the metro system through these stations each month of 2022 per official data. Transit-oriented design is an effective tool for impact at scale and we have delivered a physical example of such approach.
Building multi-use spaces allowing physical activity became popular during the 2010s, but such a network built by an interdisciplinary team and the local government in a bottom-up, data-driven process, is to our knowledge a unique project in Europe.
The initial idea was spontaneous: let’s build a square with as many experts, urban sports enthusiasts and citizens as we can attract to the idea. Let it serve all citizens of Warsaw - no matter age, sex, physical ability and economic status - and attract tourists. The idea was met with great enthusiasm, as it expressed the shift in activity patterns and demand for local answers pressing global issues. In 2022, as tragic events of the Ukraine war unfolded, one of the spaces became the main meeting place for Ukrainian youth refugees in Warsaw. As we also show, the impact of the prototyping project has translated to strategic choices for the two large public investments in central Warsaw.
We believe that the results of this complex, yet rewarding project fit the idea of the NEB prize, as it is a successful and scalable approach. We are grateful for the opportunity to work on this project and are happy to share it with the NEB community.
Social inclusion
Physical activity for all generations
Quality of public space
Climate change adaptation
Life healthspan
Using the United Nations’ SDG framework, we have contributed to three key objectives.
- Goal nr 3: Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.
Targeting the core of Warsaw’s transit allowed us to establish a network of highly available and popular spaces. It is especially important that these spaces are fitted within existing, popular walking pathways. This approach promotes activities to many citizens, creates
a platform for advanced users to share their skills with wider society and their peers from Warsaw and other cities, eagerly gathering at such locations.
- Goal 11: make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable
We saw the need to support underrepresented communities of urban activities growing in popularity, but not adopted by public investors: such as skateboarding and other roller sports, street workout, parkour, street dance, panna football. During the last decade we could see a general realization that youth was a group falling into empty space between children playgrounds and paid facilities for adult users.
While physical activity infrastructure attracts regular users, it is agreed by domain experts that it can be used as a measure of public safety, while spaces with people present in them feel safer at the visceral level of urban experience.
- Goal 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts
Depending on the project, different solutions were introduced: improving the water retention; using native species and bee-friendly plants; using a bridge as a roof protecting prolonging availability and protecting from harsh weather conditions. The themes of our project were implemented in European public spaces and the value of such an approach is increasingly understood. Our project might be exemplary, as we have created a network of such spaces at the most populated locations in the city, thus multiplying their impact.
Our main objective in terms of quality was to generate a successful public space, a friendly environment for a prolonged stay, or regular returns. In contrast to usual sport facilities, often separated from public areas, we aimed to create highly available spaces where athletes, as well as inactive people would want to spend time like on any popular public square. As all built spaces are highly popular, we believe we succeeded.
One special group of users that we wanted to support are urban athletes who did not have landmark, visible spaces for their activity in Warsaw. It was especially important for the spaces to provide quality infrastructure for daily training at any level and present some challenges for experienced users. With that, spaces could become community hubs for these disciplines, serving both as motivation and also entry points for people interested in starting such activity. All three of the spaces building the network became so-called “main spots” for their disciplines in Warsaw, attracting domestic and international visitors.
Aesthetics has been a point of focus and a differentiator, while there was a clear gap between the expectations of the younger generation and quality of offering. There weren’t many reference projects at the time we started in 2010, so we felt that it was especially important to focus on this aspect, as public spaces in Poland struggle to compete with other forms of leisure time activity, especially the carefully designed digital products. The aesthetics of the spaces inspired their use for commercial advertising campaign shoots by major brands such as Adidas, Tymbark, 4F and Pepco.
Successfully merging all these aspects together can be exemplary and we collaborated with some of the leading Polish architectural offices and urban activists, introducing our know-how to their work. We can also observe some projects taking inspiration from our results and a general shift towards including physical activity in placemaking.
We understand that including different perspectives sparks creativity and allows for higher quality of the end product. Thus we have used different inclusion strategies:
- created a framework for participation of multiple architecture offices and domain experts in a co-design process resulting in fast, high quality conceptual designs used by lead architects as reference for the design;
- engaged the public to participate in the questionnaire to examine what particular forms of activity are interesting (2500 answers gathered);
- created a full-scale temporary prototype of public space to test our ideas inside the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (February-March 2013), where users shared their feedback with the team of social researchers. The prototype was highly valuable and feedback was incorporated into our work.
As for the result, all the spaces are available free of charge and our main point of focus was to encourage different age groups to feel welcome within them. As mentioned above, it is important to provide comfortable seating and elements attractive at different levels of skill, thus creating value for both entry level and professional athletes.
One particular identified barrier of entry is the lack of equipment. Free rental of basic equipment like balls, table tennis rackets, skateboards was implemented. To further lower the barrier, workshops are available for some of the disciplines available within the spaces.
As Warsaw has accessibility standards, the spaces were analysed from this perspective and are accessible for users moving on wheelchairs.
We also gather regular feedback from users and introduce improvements and plan for long term development of the spaces. While it naturally was not our objective at the beginning of the project, in 2022 one of the three spaces became the main location of gathering of Ukrainian youth which populated all districts of Warsaw and is meeting in the city center arriving by public transport.
Involved:
The financing for two of the three locations has been voted by the citizens in a participatory budgeting vote which is organized yearly by the Warsaw City Office,
so the impact of this involvement was fundamental.
Many local experts have contributed, as our aim was to create opportunities for the professionals to put their skills to work. Our design process is inclusive and research-based. We used user feedback, observations in space, the knowledge of domain experts and sport communities leaders to deliver a quality end result, fitting the expectations and attracting large numbers of users.
Benefiting:
- All citizens benefit from the higher quality of public spaces at the popular locations and research shows that low income citizens benefit the most from free services located at hub locations.
- Young adults are the segment of users with the sharpest drop in physical activity rates. For them, the spaces make physical activity easier and they deliver a social component of interacting with friends in a high quality space.
- The network allows for easy change of location which is appreciated by the users.
- Exposition in highly populated spaces raised the interest in activities. Athletes were able to start workshop programs, generate steady income while sharing passion.
- Warsaw is becoming a place to visit for international urban athletes which benefits the local sports community and lucky viewers present at the time of performance.
Affected by:
- We see many instances of spontaneous use of the facilities by passerby pedestrians, especially in the case of street workout facility located at the main riverbank promenade.
- Many public investments were affected by the successful growth of the project - the initiating team has participated in more than 40 public space projects in Warsaw and we were engaged by groups of urban sports enthusiasts from other Polish cities.
Building the spaces required coordination of multiple city offices and public authorities. We have received ongoing support from the governing officials, especially the Vice President Olszewski responsible for urban development who is an essential figure in the success of the project. Current President, Rafał Trzaskowski has made our idea a part of his program called “Warsaw for everybody” which has solidified our working relation with the local government.
Sadly, due to the change of central government in the year 2015, the ruling conservative party has greatly limited possibilities for cooperation at the central level to any organization working directly with Warsaw City Office, due to political conflict between main parties. Many hurdles for larger cities’ development were introduced, such tax rules draining the investment budgets. Despite our absolutely non-partisan goals, the government has limited the possibility for any non-ideological NGO to receive public funding, or participate in central development. Anyhow, our plan was to stay focused entirely on Warsaw and deliver the network in order to demonstrate our ideas at scale in a single city.
We have been invited for consulting work by officials and activists from other regions of Poland, including some of the most populated regions of the country. Every single project we consulted has taught us something new and we are always eager to engage with any organisation trying to achieve their goals in our sphere of expertise.
While the project took a great amount of resources with a limited team capacity, we have not engaged with European stakeholders beyond a few study trips around Europe and occasional discussions with architects working in offices such as Foster + Partners, Zaha Hadid Architects, MVRDV and BIG. These trips and talks have helped us to understand the state of field's advancement and how we can contribute at the international level, after we deliver our main project.
We saw our role as innovation managers, but out of necessity we have also developed the ability to consult tender documents for public investors. It was our natural role within the group to communicate with the City Office and the only way to fulfil our responsibility of translating their work into a physical result. We have participated as consultants first to the public investor and then to any architectural office which would win the public contract in every building process of the network.
We believe that diversity is required for creativity, thus we have focused on gathering as interdisciplinary group as we could. We created a framework to work effectively with experts from fields: architecture, landscape design, physical activity, sociology, health, art in public space, experience design, tourism, marketing, construction, law, public infrastructure management. Our focus was to respect the time and work of everybody involved.
The main platform for interdisciplinary interaction were the conceptual workshops. They were an occasion for the group to quickly iterate through ideas for a particular plot, based on the findings of the researchers who gave a detailed briefing based on space analysis and stakeholder interviews. Inviting many architects - usually around ten, from different offices - into the same room with athletes and other experts proved to be an effective method of work. The workshops always have resulted with a basic idea that would be relevant in the later design process.
After the architects were selected design experts participated as consultants for them. Sports experts could consult the details of the architectural project fitting their needs and the projects were shared and discussed within the group.Participants appreciated the benefits of taking part in the process. Sharing their time with people from different backgrounds helped to generate many insights useful in other work. Some of the experts built lasting business relations.
The spaces have become Warsaw’s “main spots” for urban athletes, so these communities have been solidified and have grown, as the visibility of the activity enhances social interest, lowers barriers and provides a platform for interaction rarely possible in a traditional sport facility setting. This social interaction aspect is especially important for older athletes for whom the social component of activity has huge importance.
As all the investments were built entirely with public funding, the success of the process has created a lasting and effective working relation between the city authorities and elusive communities connected with urban sport activities, which are most often counter cultural and disconnected from the public sphere.
This has been beneficial in operations and investment projects of the City Office beyond the network.
Increasing participation of girls in urban sports is a global phenomenon and we have observed how the network provides the opportunity for such growth in Warsaw.
As many forms of physical activity are conducted by youth and young adults, the network provided a valuable environment for social media content creation and professional recordings used in full length video productions dedicated to physical activities.
The network has contributed to growth in popularity for all physical activity forms available, as reported by the leaders of communities involved with the projects, such as street workout, parkour, skateboarding, freestyle soccer, table tennis.
The network has inspired multiple other local initiatives, some of which are using the same logic as the initial project. It is also used by communities of urban athletes in other cities during public space investment projects.
Our work has been covered in many Polish architectural media outlets and conferences - we can see many projects building upon our experience which makes us very happy and eager to help however we can.
There is no Polish precedent for a network of multi-use spaces supporting a variety of modern physical activities for all generations at central transit hub locations and we were not able to identify such a project in Europe, despite the fact that transit-oriented design is a well established idea.
Merging sport and public transit infrastructure, creating functional and beautiful spaces for prolonged stay and social interactions is a scalable approach targeting especially youth and young adults - groups demanding special attention from the public health policy standpoint, as these groups experience the sharpest drop in activity rates and the sharpest rise of obesity rates among all age groups.
Most projects serving sport activities are focused solely on providing opportunities for training. They extensively use impermeable surfaces, unsustainable building practices and add low importance to the design of greenery or any function outside their core, thus isolating their users from other groups and lowering their social impact. In contrast, our approach shows that such places can be more inclusive and importantly, be a part of blue and green infrastructure. This is of great importance for better reception of the communities increasingly sensitive to the necessity of climate change adaptation.
Another innovative aspect of the project compared to the usual public investment process was to invite multiple architects from different offices to work on a conceptual project together - contrary to the mainstream architectural competition model, where teams submit designs with little to none possibility for interaction. Large amount of time is wasted in this model and we have seen clear benefits of a more open approach, where initial ideas are discussed and merged into a single design by the architects, experts and future users participating in the workshop.
The start of the project was very organic - an open call posted on facebook in June 2010 which has been met with high interest, as almost 1000 people signed up for updates within the first day. Since the beginning our idea was to create an inclusive process which would allow for different experts to work together and generate innovative solutions. We saw our role as project managers and group coordinators, not pushing our own ideas. This approach has increased the experts’ willingness to participate.
As we wanted to understand the local needs, we established a connection with the University of Warsaw sociology department and gathered insights in quantitative and qualitative research. We have also studied the field of urban design for physical activity which has just started to develop a fresh approach in Europe, with Superkilen and other early realisations concepts being proposed just as we started.
Our aim was to propose the idea to the City Office. As we had no prior experience in public space design, we needed to build credibility. Having earlier NGO experience, we knew that at the very early stage it helps to receive outside validation from large institutions. Therefore we have gathered signed letters of intent from the Polish Architects’ Association, the Advertising Agencies’ Association, large local media outlets and business, all showing support for the idea. We have also received a grant from the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw which is deeply engaged in discussion about the urban development of Warsaw.
The proposal sent to the City Office was met with high interest, but due various legal and organisational issues it took a long period of time - twelve years - to actually deliver the proposed network. Anyhow, we feel that the model of work proved highly successful, as it produced an appreciated physical result, allowed us to build recognition for the involved experts and their disciplines, contributing to a visible shift in Warsaw.
We feel that our work can be transferred to different locations and beneficiaries on the level of the approach, process, vision of the final product, quality aspects, products and learnings for the future. Any European urban settlement can put the existing transit hubs and transportation network development plan for a study of potential for a similar systemic intervention. This includes smaller cities, where the center of local activity is usually located around the transit hub. Moreover, there are several other public services - for instance healthy food distribution - which could be integrated with the transit infrastructure at the systemic level as well.
As professor Jan Gehl said during his presentation at the 50th anniversary of “Life between buildings" book, human needs evolve much slower than we think and are universal between cultures, as we all are of the same biological descent. This has been proved right by the last ten years of development in the field of urban design allowing physical activity. On that note, we are confident that our approach can be replicated globally and can point to instances of physical activity being universal feature of the human experience.
We can see that architects of more and more types of spaces consciously introducing unorganised physical activity as a prominent feature of design of different types of spaces – many instances of parks, plazas, stadiums and large event venues, riverbanks, parking structures and other types of infrastructure have emerged during the last decade. However, the network approach of similar kind to Warsaw has not been to our knowledge manifested to this point by other cities and could be a contribution in a discussion about sustainable urban development merging important social needs with the natural flow of the day of millions of citizens thus increasing the availability of these services.
Some of the global challenges we provide local solutions to are:
- Climate change: investments contribute to the local response to climate change. Depending on investment, we have increased water retention and supported urban biological diversity by using insect and bird friendly plants, managed the exposure to the sun, or prolonged the availability of infrastructure in harsh weather conditions.
- Obesity rate growth: Poland reported the fastest growth of teenage obesity in Europe, but it is a problem for many developed nations. Growth of physical activity is seen as the most effective measure against it, along with access to affordable, low processed food. Rethinking the quality of spaces for activity provides a new approach to addressing this important issue.
- Ageing population: European demographics poses a challenge to social security systems and Poland is reporting alerting numbers. If no action is taken, public health system costs might be problematic. Forming healthy habits of physical activity is crucial for the viability of social security, as the activity is fundamental for age-related diseases prevention. Highly available, quality spaces for activity support forming healthy habits by exposing the general public to physical activity.
- Social polarisation: as many democratic societies are torn apart and distrustful, physical activity provides a neutral platform for cooperation. Thus the value of an open, inclusive design process and highly available end product has significantly grown in our eyes and we are hopeful it might contribute to easing the tension between polarised social groups.
- Supporting the migrants: sad reality of war in Ukraine and influx of huge groups of migrants proved that freely available spaces allowing physical activity and equipment provide relief to traumatized migrants, especially the youth and young adults. While this was not our initial goal, we can see that our work has value in these tragic circumstances.
