Poland Shows the New Face of Its Cities As It Removes Annoying Ads and Billboards

If you take a moment and think about how many advertisements you see every day, we can say for sure — you’ll be shocked. Researchers say that an ordinary person comes across up to 10,000 advertisements per day. The fact is that we are surrounded by ads — they’re on our phones, our TVs, our laptops, and they also took over the streets of our cities a long time ago.

We at Bright Side couldn’t just pass by this initiative, conducted by the Polish government, in order to clean up the streets of the cities and we want to share it with our readers.

Street banners used to be an issue in Poland.

Earlier, Poland did not have any rules or restrictions concerning street banners and advertisements, aside from fees. Thus, everybody was allowed to advertise anything they wanted, if they paid the fees properly. As a result, the streets of the cities were strewn with ugly posters and unsuitable signs and the country was rapidly losing its’ unique architecture.

Everything changed in 2015 when the Polish government passed an act of legal protection of the landscape. Since this was passed, the government regulates exactly where the advertisements are placed and tries to move them further away from the city centers to the outlying areas. As a result, the cityscapes and unique architecture have come back to the forefront.

Social movements were also fighting against street ads.

Pogromcy Reklamozy, or Advertisement Busters, is a group of social activists who also seek to eradicate the Polish streets from banners and posters. They move across the country and show buildings before and after the advertisements are taken off.

Bonus: What other cities would look like without their ads

Paris, France

Tokyo, Japan

London, United Kingdom

Chinatown (California)

New York, USA

What do you think about the initiative? Would you like to clean all the ads from your city’s streets?