Revitalization of Public Spaces in Cittaslow Towns: Recent Urban Redevelopment in Central Europe

Abstract

Revitalization of cities varies depending on the scale of a city, type of challenges, and the socio-environmental context in each case. While revitalization projects carried out in globally known cities are well described, there is still a gap in characterizing revitalization processes that aim to improve quality of life in smaller units like medium-sized towns. This paper fills this gap by the insight from 82 revitalization projects implemented in 14 towns of Warmia and Mazury region (Poland) which are associated in the Cittaslow movement. The study combines a quantitative assessment of statistical data describing these projects with their qualitative evaluation based on interviews with local experts. The results of conducted analyses show that socio-economic development plays a major role as, despite projects which directly refer to the social domain, social elements were found also in projects initially categorized as those targeted to architectural and spatial domains. On the other hand, the authors observed that environmental and ecological as well as cultural issues are treated unevenly or marginally in projects compared to social ones. Interviews with experts show that the least importance was assigned to cultural and historical domain. The obtained results might constitute important knowledge to understand the background of current revitalization processes outside of global metropolises to improve future mechanisms supporting urban renewal.

Spatial Chaos as a Result of War Damage and Post-War Transformations. Example of the Small Town of Węgorzewo

“…Revitalization processes increasingly include blocks of flats, settlements, and post-military, post-railway, and post-industrial areas. The negative spatial phenomena observed in Polish cities and towns of this period include the urban landscape being littered with multi-colored advertisements, often in a large format, a decrease in the level of spatial planning aimed at the maximal use of free space and dense development, the dictatorship of developers imposing the form and price of constructed buildings and premises, urban infills with ill-fitting buildings in terms of spatial context, the dictatorship of ground rent, the construction of smaller commercial and consumer facilities with poor aesthetics, and the location of large shopping centers in city centers, often in areas of historical urban tissue and others [35,[60][61][62][63][64].…”

Preserving identity while reorganizing urban spaces

“…There is a semantic dissonance between the official and actual meanings and meanings of the territory. Thus, it is extremely important in the process of designing public spaces to take into account the peculiarities of the formation of the city's symbolic identity, to identify and preserve the characteristic features of the uniqueness of the city [14,15]. At the same time, the local identity of a certain territory should be considered as one of the facets of the symbolic space of the city as a whole.…”

Housing Price Forecasting in Selected Polish Cities During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…The United Nations [13] confirms that urban systems, as the centre of human production and life (approximately 55% of the world's population, 4.2 billion inhabitants), are the ground zero of the COVID-19 pandemic, with 90% of reported cases. The urban space zone is a multilayer spatial structure gathering people and products of their activities in nearby places [14][15][16][17][18]. There is a strong positive feedback between the specific nature of an urban area (which arises from the local features of cities in a geospatial, economic, administrative, and social sense), and the function of the housing market, which at the same time responds to megatrends in the market environment.…”