The ‘Lublin of the Future’ – Clean, Hygienic, Orderly. Making a Clean Sweep with the Jewish Neighbourhood and its Sensescape

Abstract

Regulating and disciplining the urban environment, especially the sensory improprieties of a city, have always been a crucial means to demonstrate new political orders. This article examines how various authorities attempted to regulate and reshape the Old Town neighbourhood of the Polish city of Lublin during the first half of the twentieth century and how a continuous discourse on order and cleanliness reinforced ethnic, class and political prejudices. It shows how the sensory mapping of the city in pre-war times, including noisome odours, crowdedness and unsightly buildings related, more often than not, to the area’s ‘Jewishness’. The profound changing of the Old Town neighbourhood after the Second World War was a major symbolic act of the new communist regime to make a clean sweep of unpleasant legacies to create the ‘Lublin of the future’.