The Rawa is a 19.6-km-long river flowing through centers of the main cities of Upper Silesia in Poland: Ruda Śląska, Świętochłowice, Chorzów, and Katowice.
The rapid development of heavy industry and urbanization at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries caused its natural sources to disappear. From then on it was mainly fed with sewage from nearby mines and steel mills and with municipal sewage from growing cities. As a result, some cities have decided to route the river to an underground collector.
These photographs present the landscape of post-industrial cities, on the one hand, degraded by heavy industry, but at the same time slowly recovering thanks to the services sector and new technologies.
— Aleksander Wasilewski, Upper Silesia, Poland
