Lockdown in a disneyfied city: Kraków Old Town and the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic

This paper presents the geography of the historic central district of Kraków, Poland before, during and after the first wave of the 2020 pandemic. It describes how the disneyfied main part of the UNESCO heritage site of universal values turned into a ghost town as functional changes were turning into physical ones amid restrictions. From the results of pre-pandemic processes (that, as we argue, turned the city into its disneyfied version), to the lockdown (that later revealed itself to be but the first one in a row), to the post-lockdown recovery, these changes are presented in modified figure-ground diagrams with accessibility being defined by both tangible and intangible properties. The results are set against the background of the city’s current policies regarding economic recovery, mobility and accessibility to urban green areas. As an attempt to address the present vulnerability of the once resilient historic city centres—of which Kraków Old Town is a luminous example—this paper tends to be a voice in the debate on the post-2020 planning and the strategies we will need to face the subsequent waves of this, or other, pandemics as well as consequences of climate change.