An attempt to assess the degree of urbanity of new towns in Poland based on the morphological criterion

Abstract

In the years 1980—2018, the number of towns and cities in Poland increased from 803 to 930. However, the problem of the administrative procedure is the lack of clearly defined criteria of urbanity and the lack of measurable indicators that could be used to verify the settlements applying for the status of a city. This applies, in particular, to the measures identifying the character of the morphology of settlements. The main objective of this research is to propose a set of indicators based on generally available statistical data describing the morphology of settlements, which could be used in the administrative procedure of granting the city status. The proposed indicators were used to analyse the morphology of cities in Poland in order to verifying their suitability to describe quantified degree of urbanity. The focus was on cites, which received city status in the years 2000—2014, because these cities should formally meet the criteria adopted in the administrative procedure. Data for cities (for 2014) were taken from Local Data Bank of Statistics Poland. Analyses have shown that in the case of new cities proposed morphological indexes assume values indicating low or very low level of their urbanization.