Recent urban and population change in Poland

Abstract

This paper documents recent changes in urban and population trends in Poland. These changes include a sharp decrease in the spatial mobility of the population, a transition from population concentration to deconcentration at inter-regional scale, and a weakening of the dominance of metropolitan core areas vis-à-vis metropolitan rings. Such trends typify many highly-urbanized countries today, and have been highlighted in recent geographical and planning literature. However, the current interregional, as well as intrametropolitan deconcentration trends in Poland are probably of transitional character and are likely to be discontinued in the 1990s. By then, rates of internal migration may be expected to increase again, since the large population cohorts bom in the 1970s will be entering the labour market. As a country at an intermediate, rather than late, urbanization and development level, Poland still seems rather distant from the point at which population deconcentration becomes the dominant trend at both the interregional and the urban scale.