Phantoms of Diversity: Reclaiming Multicultural Pasts through More-Than-Human Alliances in Urban Voids

Before World War II, Poznań was home to a vibrant Jewish community that significantly shaped the city’s cultural and social fabric. Like many cities in Central and Eastern Europe, its multicultural character was deeply altered by the war, leading to the near-erasure of its Jewish heritage. While traces of this multicultural past still linger in the urban environment, these sites remain abandoned and largely uncommemorated. Threatened by the forces of capitalist urban transformation, these urban voids reflect a process of forgetting Poznań’s diverse heritage rather than preserving its memory.

In this context, the paper explores how urban voids can foster more-than-human alliances, offering opportunities to reclaim forgotten multicultural pasts and construct progressive futures. Urban voids are liminal spaces in contemporary cities, caught between obsolete past functions and future redevelopments. Simultaneously, their material degradation gives rise to new qualities that can contribute to the development of new urban imaginaries. The analysis focuses on the case of the Edmund Szyc Stadium in Poznań. Once appropriated as a forced labor camp for Jews during the German occupation, the now-abandoned stadium has become a habitat for an emergent ecosystem, lacking any material acknowledgment of its past. By engaging with the more-than-human elements of the space, the paper argues that urban voids like the Edmund Szyc Stadium can serve as catalysts for re-engaging with forgotten cultural diversity. In doing so, they offer an alternative approach to commemorating the multicultural histories of cities like Poznań, challenging dominant memory politics and proposing new practices of urban ecology and remembrance.