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The problem of using the concept of post-industrialism to define regions with traditional industries is addressed in this article. It focuses on the diversity of industrial development in the Katowice conurbation (Poland) and the difficulties of situating the region in the widely-used taxonomy by Phelps and Ozawa, which assumes a one-way transition from the late-industrial to post-industrial stage. The authors point to the fact that only some of the towns can be described as post-industrial, since there are also towns in which traditional industries continue to develop relatively well and others at an advanced stage of re-industrialisation. The proposal is made that the Katowice conurbation can be described as a "trans-industrial region" in order to account for the various stages of development in the industrial sector in the towns of the conurbation, and to underline the dynamic nature and temporal variability of the industrialisation factor in the region.

The increasing number of wastelands in East-central European countries is primarily a consequence of functional transformations and movements in the structure of employment. Taking into account such a challenge in this article, the authors propose an approach in which the basic category is a typological proposal with reference to areas with derelict functions, which in turn refers to research within the scope of human geography. In their methodological proposal, the authors consider such variables as: (i) the diversification of management and use of space; (ii) time; (iii) economic functions; and (iv) the scope of geographic research. The effect of including these variables is an attempt to dynamically depict the evolution of land use, with particular attention paid to wasteland: original state - transitional state (derelict areas) - present state. The typological depiction of the emergence and transformation of areas with derelict functions is presented for the case of Sosnowiec.

Suburbanisation represents one of the most important contemporary problems facing large urban agglomerations. An analysis of the development of urban agglomerations in Central-Eastern Europe, and especially Poland, leads to the observation that this problem is not particularly advanced in any of them. The aim of this article has thus been to examine how relevant it might be to consider the suburbanisation stage in large Polish agglomerations, as a permanent feature of the Klaassen/Paelinck and van den Berg models. Specifically, the article focuses on Poland's seven largest agglomerations, though there is a particular emphasis on the Katowice conurbation. The essence of the study lay in the identification of differences in the population balance between these agglomerations, and above all, between their cores and outer zones. The study also included data on the structure characterising out-migrations. A consequence of the study was to draw attention to the apparent diversity of the Katowice conurbation, the only one in Poland to record a population decline in both the core area and the outer zone. This specificity was explained mainly by the drivers of polycentricity and post-industrialism. In other agglomerations, these elements were either absent altogether or were involved in separate shaping of urban regional space.

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