Issue of Protecting Historic Urban Layouts of Small Towns in South-Eastern Poland – On Selected Examples

Abstract

The article addresses the issue of protecting historic urban layouts of small towns in south-eastern Poland. The problem will be presented on the example of such towns as Dukla, Kołaczyce, Brzostek, Sieniawa and Skawina. Those towns were established during the medieval period, and their spatial layouts represent the urban models used at the time, which were based on full regularity. Among those most frequently applied within the discussed area were: 9-square model, turbine or pseudo-oval model also known as Silesian. Both during the last 50 years and nowadays, in the course of the intensified multi-faceted town development, those layouts and historic buildings surrounding them have been in grave danger of degradation, or even annihilation. It is worth emphasising, that only some of those layouts are under statutory legal protection thanks to an entry in the voivodeship register of immovable monuments. The others are not protected in any way, unless they have been included in Local Spatial Development Plans. As a result, their historic spatial layouts have been uncontrollably transformed or even obliterated. Such tendencies have a definitely negative impact on the cultural landscape, the identity of the place, but also on the spatial order of the centres of those towns. Therefore, more emphasis should be put on the issue of protecting those layouts and buildings surrounding them. Maybe cultural parks, which would help in ordering and revalorising those spaces, should be created in the centres of small historic towns on a larger scale. One should also demand ordering the traffic layouts in those towns, since frequently main supralocal roads run through historic town centres thus negatively influencing their cultural landscape, as well as their reception as a homogeneous urban interior. Another important question is educating the society about the protection of cultural heritage values, in this case historic urban layouts, which also entail such non-material aspects as traditions and the origins of a given town. field.