Which Polish Cities Sprawl the Most

Abstract

Spatial transformations stemming from urban sprawl are evident not only in the USA or Western Europe but also in Central and Eastern Europe, including Poland. Urban sprawl materialises mostly in land-cover and land-use change involving an increase in the proportion of urbanised areas and discontinuous urban fabric in the total area. The paper’s objective was to identify the degree of urban sprawl based on the area of discontinuous urban fabric. The spatial analysis was aimed at finding differences in land-cover ratios by individual urbanised land categories. The analysed data for 2006, 2012, and 2018 were retrieved from the Urban Atlas. The method employed was NUASI (normalised Urban Atlas sprawl indicator). A series of computations revealed that urban sprawl is found in Poland as well. Changes caused by the increase in the discontinuous urban fabric in the total urban fabric were the most pronounced from 2006 to 2012. From 2012 to 2018, the pace of the increase stabilised, but its dynamics declined. The study demonstrated a strong spatial variability of the indicator. Urban sprawl was found to be the most intense in southern and southeastern Poland.