Since the second half of the 20th century many cities in Poland lose population and the rate is more than likely to increase in future. The determinants that have the greatest impact on the process of shrinking cities are those related to economic transformation and restructuring of the so called traditional industry and consequences of the second demographic transition. In general, it can be distinguished a few main drivers for shrinkage of cities: transformation, suburbanization, demographic change (e.g. falling birth rates, outmigration in rural depopulation areas), environmental pollution. Shrinkage is a varied phenomenon because of its multidimensional, multiscalar and multitemporal character. But the multifacted character of these processes renders their recognition and estimation difficult.
The purpose of the article is to identify the sorts of shrinking cities and to presents method of measuring this process. This paper presents the differentiation of shrinking cities process in Poland on the basic of selected empirical indicators. A detailed analysis was conducted in cities with more than 100 thousand inhabitants in the period of 2000–2017.
Prof. Przemysław Śleszyński from the PAS Institute of Geography and Spatial Organization in Warsaw (author of an extensive study of 122 medium-sized Polish cities) explains why Poland’s midsize cities are facing depopulation.
Depopulation is understood as a real population loss in an area represented by a negative population change. In the present-day Poland, the process is particularly distinct in the economically underperforming areas situated on the peripheries of large urban centres, but some of the most populous cities are also affected by it. The purpose of the presented research using Webb’s typology was to identify Polish poviats that were depopulating in all the years from 2002 to 2014 as a result of natural population decline and negative migration balance (two-factor depopulation). In the research, special attention was given to the rate of change in the number of population (total and by age group) and to a net natural and migration loss in the selected poviats. Selected characteristics of the 2014 population age structure in Poland were also evaluated. The basis for all findings presented in the paper is vital and migratory statistics for the years 2002 to 2014 and the data on poviats’ population age structure from 2002 and 2014 published by the Central Statistical Office.
In the 20th century toponymy of the Kłodzko Land underwent serious changes, which with no doubt can be called a revolution. After 1945 and the displacement of the German population all the pre-war names were substituted with Polish ones, which, unfortunately, only rarely were connected with the former tradition, in some cases as old as the middle ages. Most of new names were introduced by a special commission whose main aim was to mark that the new areas gained by Poland after the World War II (the so called Regained Territories) were successfully taken into possession. However, many places and objects (some mountain tops, rock formations, springs, parts of villages) did not receive a name. In the next decades, new local communities started to accustom the mountainous landscape and independently gave names to various nameless (in Polish) places. Unfortunately, due to the depopulation of rural areas in the Kłodzko Land and other formal reasons, the process was quite slow. The main aim of the paper is not only to analyse those changes, but also to compare the numbers of names in chosen moments of the 20th century. For this purpose three types of maps in 1 : 25 000 scale were used: pre-war (German) “Meßtischblatt”, a Polish topographic map representing the situation at the beginning of the 1970s and, finally, the “Army topographic map” from the end of the 20th century. On the first map 531 geographical names were marked, on the second — only 225, and on the third — 277, which is still approximately half of the number before 1945.