The Hidden Face of Urbanity - Morphological Differentiation of Degraded and Restituted Towns in Poland in the Context of the Efficacy of the National Administrative System

Abstract: This master’s thesis deals with the concept of urbanity in Poland, where it coincides with a judicial, administrative understanding of urbanity. A specific of the Polish administrative system is that it utilizes town privileges – a mediaeval remnant – to symbolically define formally urban areas. Such a practice inadvertently creates confusion in terms of what urbanity exactly means. Town privileges are widely associated with historical events, such as the 1869-70 administrative reform enforced by the Russian occupation of Poland, depriving 336 towns (75 %) of their urban status. The issue of foreign oppression, as well as Poland’s chequered relations with Russia, makes this particular loss of urbanity an important identity issue for the towns concerned. Loss of urban status is further emphasized by the fact that the lack of town privileges in Poland degrades a settlement to rural status, which – in this particular context – may be disadvantageous in terms of prestige, economic growth, community cohesion and preservation of cultural heritage. Although 40 % of the reform towns have to date been restituted, recovery of urban status has been hampered by an array of obstacles, which in turn could be tantamount to the undermining of the meaning and the purpose of the concept of urbanity. Such a situation cannot be satisfactorily accommodated today, particularly when granting urban status may be restricted by specific official prerequisites. One of the most important constituents of urbanity in governmental evaluations today is the attribute urban morphology. However, urban morphology – along with the derivative attribute urban consciousness – is considered to be the most difficult to assess, most likely as a result of its close association with the subjective arts of architecture and urban design. The difficulties in obtaining relevant data have resulted in these two attributes of urbanity being the least examined. Consequently, the task of this study has been to investigate how the concept of urbanity – as conveyed by the Polish administrative system – corresponds to de facto conditions in regard to the variable urban morphology. In order to conduct a large-scale comparative inquiry on the matter, a necessary intermediate – yet major – objective has been to assemble and devise an appropriate methodology for this particular task. Drawing upon a wide range of theories as well as observations of current trends and practices in urban design (including field studies in various degraded towns), I propose an approach based in part on eclectic methods (regarding town plan complexity and physiognomy) as well as a totally new methodology. The latter acknowledges market squares as the most important commercial, social, cultural, functional and symbolic hubs of small traditional towns, along with their crucial role as denominators of small-town urbanity. With the intent to moderate the impact of subjectivity inherent to traditional field-based observations (including approximation-laden impreciseness and human error), I have resorted to satellite imagery and aerial photography as primary sources of data subject to analysis. The new methodology was subsequently validated by field observations in 69 of the studied towns. The objects of study were the aforementioned 336 reform towns and the analytical basis consisted mainly of comparisons between the morphologies of restituted (formally urban) and degraded (formally rural) towns. An important finding is that although the restituted towns are generally morphologically more urban than the degraded ones, the problem is not in what the system includes but in what it excludes, as illustrated by the large number of degraded towns that fully meet the current criteria for urbanity. Inclusion itself may also be problematic as granting town privileges to units significantly divergent from contemporary urbanization standards automatically deepens the breach between de jure and de facto urbanity. In conclusion, the studied set of towns shows an immense morphological differentiation with extremes at either end of the rural-urban divide, and a distinct reshuffle of urban and rural units in its middle part. Previous studies have shown occurrences of continuum structures in various geographic contexts, particularly in regard to heterogeneous groups of towns; this study stipulates that continual morphological configurations occur just as much in sets of towns with similar morphogenetical backgrounds and histories. As such, I argue that the reform of 1869-70 can no longer act as an umbrella term affixed to towns that are ‘de facto urban yet unjustly rural’, but is rather a cloak of misinformation under which reactionary aspirations are allowed to flourish. Furthermore, I have examined the spatiality of current restitutions, taking into account factors such as diffusion of innovations, agglomeration proximity, territorial-administrative barriers and occurrences of city deserts, concluding that the lingering restitutional inertia is most likely the effect of a faulty system that permits the retention of the aftermaths of the old reform. I argue that the system is deceptive, counterintuitive and discriminatory, but also inconsistent in terms of susceptibility to manipulation, improper monitoring and lack of self-regulatory mechanisms. Last but not least, it renders a misconceived national urbanization profile, which nonetheless serves as a foundation for official statistics and the various developmental policies and strategies derived therefrom. It is argued that one way of improving the system could be through separation of the cultural element from the administrative arena.