Search for: [Abstract = "This article shows that prisons are part of the urban fabric. Even if they are surrounded by walls and physically limited in their access, they are part of a dense web of communication between those inhabitants who live in town and those who are incarcerated. As the first argument, the author points to the various forms of everyday exchange between the prison and the city\: food, work, information and personnel. In the second argument, the authors notes the impact of large\-scale urban infrastructures such as the central prison for the Prussian district of Poznań for the further development of the small city of Wronki. As opposed to larger Polish cities such as Poznań, Warsaw and Toruń, the city did not grow to such an extent, to fully include the prison area. In any case, the Wronki prison, which opened in 1894, became a modernizing force within the urban structure of the town, partly because of the houses dedicated to the guards and located outside the prison walls, partly because of technical solutions such as a new water pressure tower which created a highly visible new visual axis between the old part of Wronki and the prison area. The new town hall, erected in 1910 next to the prison, shows that a prison was also perceived in the earlier twentieth century as a public space. The article argues that it was not only a infrastructure for incarceration by the state authorities, but a representation of the state itself. The architectural surface, the complex inner structure, and the multifunctional purpose of the ensemble were supposed to represent the modern character of the Prussian state. As the same was true for the newly reformed independent Polish state after 1918, the prison was easily adopted by the Polish prison administrative body after the end of WWI."]

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