The presented images are formally consistent. They also share certain elements, such as the same fragments of space shown in a different perspective, or landmarks: the Palace of Culture, the church at Nowolipki Street, the blue high-rise at Plac Bankowy where the great synagogue at Tłomackie Street used to stand, or the court building and Protestant church at Solidarności Avenue (formerly Leszno Street). These elements allow the viewer to mentally reconstruct the entirety of the documented area. A map created by cartographer Paweł Weszpiński for the purposes of Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak’s monumental publication, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City, complements the project. In the map, Warsaw’s present street grid has been superimposed on a detailed plan of the nonexistent city, while the few surviving relics of Ghetto development have been additionally marked.

Other City proposes a reflection on the successive stages of the development of postwar Warsaw, on the concepts and ideas of architecture and urban planning, each of which emerges from a view of the past while being a form of thinking about present and future society: from egalitarian visions of social housing to the neo-liberal logic of maximum profit without regard for legacy architecture and at the expense of social cohesion. The emblematic places documented in the photographs – the former Berson and Bauman Hospital, the Nożyk Synagogue, the former Nalewki Street, the former Umschlagplatz, and others — embed Other City in the history of Jewish Warsaw. For Janicka and Wilczyk’s project is also an attempt to recapitulate the identity of the territory and the consciousness of the community that has constituted itself on the site of the former Ghetto. In this sense, it raises questions about postwar Polish culture’s and society’s attitude toward an unprecedented civilisational catastrophe. Other City makes evident that the Holocaust transpired right in the centre of the social and cultural tissue yet has received no central, paradigmatic, cultural representation to this day.