We are observing an increase in development activity of the cities with poviat rights nowadays. It is visible especially in the area of obtaining European funds, financial policy, infrastructure or entrepreneurship. Those matters, especially experience of cities with poviat rights as the main beneficiaries became an interesting research area now. The aim of the article is to assess the competitiveness and development level of the cities with poviat rights in voivodships of Eastern Poland. For the purposes of this article, a synthetic measure has been used. Taking into account the availability and comparability of data as well as statistical criteria, the variables describing: financial situation, economy and infrastructure in the system of cities with poviat rights in voivodships of Eastern Poland were adopted. Data from the Local Data Bank of the Central Statistical Office for 2008, 2012 and 2016 were the main source of the article.

There are numerous diff erences between EU Member States, e.g. related to geographic location, language, culture, etc. The main difference can be primarily found in the level of development of individual regions and voivodeships in Europe. Poor regions and voivodeships in the conditions of growing competition lose their distance to the wealthy ones. The European Union, having this in mind, has given a priority in its regional policy to reduce the disparities between regions by providing aid through the socio-economic cohesion policy to neglected provinces. This problem is of a particular importance in the Polish context due to the large diff erences between the voivodeships. Large disproportions are visible especially between voivodeships of Eastern Poland whose potential, especially innovative potential, is among the weakest in Poland and in the EU. The aim of the article is to review the concepts of innovation, to present the innovative potential of particular Polish voivodeships in 2020 and to defi ne innovative potential’s signifi cance in the development. For the calculation of the synthetic index, there was used a non-model method.

There are more and more new development challenges emerging in Polish cities and regions recently. Because of those challenges we can observe an increase of the role of cities and associated environments. The concept of cities’ impact on the environment is a result of many processes, such as: suburbanization, reurbanization, increasing population mobility, development of transport systems, innovation, or entrepreneurship. A city is a complex entity, it is a subject to dynamic changes, to understand which we need interdisciplinary knowledge or the combination of many different approaches along with an attempt to draw many conclusions. We can find numerous theoretical examples describing city-regional environment relations in the literature. In general, these models explain the relationship between economically strong cities (metropolis) and the regions. However, there is not much literature and research explaining the nature and strength of relationships with medium-sized cities. There are also very few ideas for developing the potential of medium-sized cities in polish national policy. The aim of the article is to present disproportions in the development of medium-sized cities in voivodships of Eastern Poland in 2010-2017. The author will also present the possibility of using a synthetic measure to assess and recognize the spatial diversity of medium-sized cities development.