Alternative between Revitalisation of City Centres and the Rising Costs of Extensive Land Use from a Polish Perspective

Abstract

The phenomenon of spatial chaos is ever-growing challenge in Poland. Its most common explanations are the weaknesses of spatial planning and the households’ economic-based decisions of building a house in the suburbs. In this context, Polish publications lack analyses of the impact of local authorities’ on shaping conditions for the development of new housing and renovation of the existing ones. The authors put forward a thesis about the persistence of an extensive land use policy model in Poland, in which local governments create conditions favouring area-consuming approach to locating buildings. At the same time, the same local governments allow de-agriculturalisation of land plots with a consequence that newly developed areas are not equipped with utilities (e.g., sewage or heating networks). Chaos in the development of residential areas is also illustrated by another phenomenon. Local authorities designate large degraded and revitalisation areas. This results in the dispersed effects. The article concentrates on these three symptoms of spatial chaos in Poland, i.e., random and dispersed expansion of new investments in sewage system, lack of integration between district heating systems and direction of residential development and dispersed effects of revitalisation, which cannot prevent flight from blight. The obtained results allowed to confirm the thesis about the extensive land use policy model in Poland.