Urbanization Chaos of Suburban Small Cities in Poland: ‘Tetris Development’

Abstract

This paper investigates the phenomenon of spatial chaos in Poland resulting from urban sprawl. The phenomenon is particularly visible in the case of suburban small cities which, in contrast to cities in the EU-15 countries with similar populations, are expanding excessively, causing a growth of urbanized areas exceeding several times the growth of their population. Suburbs of these cities increasingly resemble a badly played Tetris game. The selected study area consists of several cities in the Warsaw suburban zone where an increased dynamic of these processes can be observed. The paper presents detailed studies concerning the selected representative small cities. The morphology of urban tissue was studied as a marker of spatial order including: development intensity, street grid, plots parameters, presence of technical infrastructure, and distance from the functional city center. The analyses were performed based on cartographic archives, the data of the Central Statistical Office of Poland, topographic database and Kernel Density Estimation. ArcGIS ESRI and AutoCad software was used to present the study results. The conducted studies intend to diagnose the changes in the spatial layout in the context of the objectives of spatial order and sustainable development, and to define the indicators which should be taken into account in spatial planning documents drawn up for the studied areas.

Keywords

• spatial chaos
• urban sprawl
• suburban zone
• small cities
• land use analysis
• Poland