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Following the end of the Second World War, the communist authorities in Poland enacted a legislation that transferred ownership of all land in Warsaw to the municipality. Consequently, the institution of private landownership in the Polish capital formally ceased to exist. However, expropriated landowners did not automatically lose all property rights to their land. In theory, they could apply for a lesser property right—known, at different stages, as ‘construction right’, ‘perpetual lease’, ‘temporary ownership’, and eventually ‘perpetual usufruct’—which also allowed them to retain ownership of buildings.
Despite this fundamental reconfiguration of the legal structure of landownership, the new legal order did not correspond to everyday land relations in Warsaw. Promised compensation was never paid, and applications for lesser property rights were commonly rejected or ignored. Although the municipality became the formal legal owner of all land, it exercised its ownership powers only selectively, primarily in cases where land was needed for redevelopment or public utility purposes. In practice, former landowners continued to occupy ‘their’ land and buildings without any formal title.
This paper examines how the programme of land communalisation in Warsaw was conceptualised, developed, and implemented by analysing a wide range of legal, political, urbanist, and public debates in the early years of communist Poland (c. 1944–1960). It argues that there was a significant discrepancy between the multilayered genealogies of land communalisation—many of which were not inherently ideological or ‘communist’ at their inception—and the programme’s eventual implementation, which became dispossessory and ideological. By exploring the paradoxes of communist land communalisation in Warsaw, this paper sheds light on the complex relationship between law and politics, and between property as a legal institution and property as lived experience in post-war Warsaw.
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