Lodz City Tour: The Changing Nature of the Urban Restructuring of a Post-Socialist Industrial City

Abstract

This paper describes the restructuring of Poland’s third-largest city, Lodz (Łódź). Once a thriving metropolitan hub of textile and clothing manufacturing, Lodz was confronted with the closure of its numerous factories in the early 1990s with Poland’s transition from a planned to a global market economy. The city suffered an abrupt and dramatic decline followed by a redefinition of its economic, spatial and social structures. The paper focuses on the major economic and spatial phenomena taking place in the city in the three decades after the economic collapse. Using an evolutionary approach, it identifies and discusses the gradual shift of Lodz’s restructuring. We claim that the restructuring initially involved mostly organic and spontaneous initiatives of dynamic local and non-local actors, with minor and circumstantial involvement from the local authorities. However, over time, the restructuring of Lodz has become influenced and driven by nationally and EU-set objectives and targeted urban policies, with urban and infrastructural projects as driving vehicles.