This city planner with Ukrainian roots feels good rediscovering her sense of being Ukrainian, and here everything she learned in school about architecture is being blown away.
y toward a fine collection. She did her undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia; her two Masters degrees (in city planning and science and transportation engineering) are from the University of California, Berkeley; she’s worked for the New York City Parks Department; and she’s lived in London and traveled throughout Western Europe.
“Traveling for me is research. Whenever I’m seeing something new, it’s research for me, and I’m constantly observing and learning from [cities]. I would like to see as many different urban spaces as possible in this world,” says Poliwka, whose Fulbright project in Ukraine is to study historical and contemporary urban development patterns.
The mellow, serious urban advocate and I met at Marokana on a rather chilly November evening for a very late lunch.
Lounging on the fluffy pillows, Poliwka ordered an Evian (Hr 15) and her first of several glasses of orange juice (Hr 20). “Freshly squeezed orange juice,” she says with a smile.
“It’s my favorite drink in California and I’m glad I can drink it here also,” she says. “That and Chernihivske Biyle,” she adds with a mischievous smile.
No-meat Master
A vegetarian since college, Poliwka ordered the vegetarian rolls (Hr 24) and a sauteed vegetable dish (Hr 47).
“When I was a child I never liked meat. I lived in a traditional Ukrainian household that would force meat upon me and I would sit at the table crying because I didn’t want to eat it,” Poliwka reminisces.
“As I learned more about it, I’ve taken on political reasons for not eating meat, but I think some people are just born vegetarians and my body isn’t programmed for meat.”
That doesn’t stop her from eating well, though. She’s found her “dude” at the Volodymyrskiy Market who hooks her up with lentils and vegetables – and she’s also imported staple spices and grains from home that she says you just cannot find here. She puts all of it to use in her kitchen, where, she says, “magic is made,” as guests of her now-famous dinner party/movie nights ought to know.
On City Planning
Poliwka’s interest in urban development and city planning stems from two different aspects of her life. One was her experience of growing up and attending school in the inner city of Chicago.
“It had people from all over the city, so my grade school experience was very formative, because I learned then how to live with people of different classes, colors, races and economic backgrounds, and for me that has been a very key aspect to what it means to live in an urban environment; it’s the high exposure to differences and people learning to live with each other,” Poliwka states.
Meanwhile, her interest in urban development grew along with her love of cycling.
“[Cycling] really opened up my eyes to making those connections between the differences that I appreciate about cities, and at the right speed,” she says. “The bicycle empowered me, and that’s how I started to find my voice as an activist, in terms of trying to make cities better places for people to live in.
“It’s been really hard on me not having a bike here because it’s not the natural way I exist in a city,” says Poliwka, who describes riding a bike as “liberated ecstasy.” Although she can’t hop on a bike here and go where she pleases, she loves the convenience of being able to hail a cab wherever she is and be taken wherever it is she wants to go. “I also like being able to afford it. I get off on mobility,” she says.
Along with the biking, Poliwka is also a big fan of the ’60s French situationist movement known as derive.
“Derive was a continuous flow in which protagonists embarked upon a surrealist trip, a dreamy trek through varied Parisian passageways, forever on foot, wandering for hours, usually at night, identifying subtle moods and nuances of neighborhoods…shifting in and out of public spaces, accumulating rich qualitative data,” she explains.
“I haven’t done it enough, but that’s something I’d do in the summer – I’d leave my house and have a map in my bag, but I wouldn’t look at the map until I actually wanted to go somewhere. I discovered new neighborhoods that way.”
The Kyiv Experience
On her Fulbright scholarship, Poliwka is researching city planning, transport engineering and the state of urban design in Ukraine. She’s talking with industry players and attends the weekly meetings of the city planning commissions and the architectural design review board.
She’s also working on a plan for an underdeveloped area of the Left Bank. She’d like to introduce the concept of a “transit village” to Kyiv – space developed with public transit in mind. However, she doesn’t seem too confident about how it will be received at city hall.
“The level of design in this city is suffering because people make the decisions for the wrong reasons,” she says. “The reaction that I’ve had from decision makers and educators in Kyiv is that of straight-out fear: fear of change, of new ideas, fear of flexibility, fear of losing a position of power,” Poliwka continues.
Describing the current situation in Kyiv, she begins: “It’s still the same ‘living in a box’ with no sense of community outside of your building and, in that sense, the trend is continuing. It just has a modern day facelift.
“But from an architectural standpoint I feel that people are using old templates and they’re not really pushed in a direction to create anything new, because the consumer expectation is not there for it.”
“It’s really taken a lot of what I learned from the history of planning and turned it on its head,” she concludes.
Despite what she’s learned of Kyiv, Poliwka says nothing could have stopped her coming here.
“I’ve decided [being Ukrainian] is part of who I am, and I wanted to see what Ukraine is about today, and not the Ukraine that was fed to us by old Diasporans.”
Marokana (24 Lesi Ukrainky, 254-4999).
Open daily from 8 a.m. till 2 a.m.
English menu: Yes.
English-speaking staff: Yes.
