Magdalena Gawin

The main goal of the article is to show the possibility and necessity of thinking of urban space in the political perspective. In order to do that, I present set of tools elaborated by David Harvey in his text “Space as a Key Word”. They can be used to analyze different types of space – particularly urban space – in an orderly way. I then use those tools to examine one type of urban space, which is the “scattered city”. This example and its critique allow me to link scattered cities with a certain type of politics. In the next step I show a selected range of political problems, questions, and convictions connected with urban space.

This paper focuses on the relations between a liberal group of sex reformers, consisting of writers and literary critics, and physicians from the Polish Eugenics Society in interwar Poland. It illustrates the paradoxes of the mutual co-operation between these two groups during the 1930s and analyses the reason why compulsory sterilisation was rejected by politicians. From the early 1930s two movements began to forge an alliance in Poland: the sexual reform movement which advocated freedom of the individual, and eugenics, which called for limiting the freedom of the individual for the collective good. This paper draws attention to several issues which emerged as part of this collaboration: population politics, the relationship between reformers, eugenicists and state institutions, and the question of how both movements—eugenics and sexual reform—perceived the question of sexuality, birth control and abortion. It will also focus on those aspects of their thinking that led to mutual co-operation