Ośrodki wojewódzkie w Polsce – ujęcie alternatywne. Część 2

Date of release of the digital version under CC-BY-SA licence: August 2024

Voivodship centres in Poland - an alternative approach Part 2

This book forms the second part of a monograph dealing with voivodship centres in Poland. The research concerns 18 cities, except for Chapters 5 and 4 which disregard Warszawa and Lublin, respectively. The cities studied are sites of a voivodship’s self-government organs (the voivodship parliament and marshal, the voivode, or any of these). The six chapters classify the cities studied into specific groups based on approaches that differ from those found most often in the literature.

Chapter 1 (Voivodship centres in school-level education) characterises the most widespread and basic knowledge on voivodship centres, taught in geography classes in Polish schools, at the level of primary, mid-level, and secondary schools, a topic not tackled in the scientific literature so far. Tomasz Rydzewski, the author and an active university and secondary school teacher, analysed school geography textbooks from the standpoint of information on individual Polish voivodship centres they contain. He focussed mainly on finding out whether the names of voivodship centres appeared in the texts, and if so, in what format and context, at different levels of schooling, both in terms of textual and graphic (maps, tables, graphs, photographs) rendering. Sections on socio-economic problems and regional geography of Poland in textbooks made available by three leading Polish educational publishers (Nowa Era, Operon, and Wydawnictwo Szkolne i Pedagogiczne) were analysed. In addition, for comparative purposes, contents of the current secondary-school textbooks were compared with those published prior to the educational system reform of 1999. The study produced data on the frequency with which individual voivodship centres were mentioned in the textbooks during geography instruction at schools of different level. The author strove to reveal a pattern underlying the frequency analysed. He also showed the frequency-based order of individual voivodship capitals’ appearance in the textbooks. The centres mentioned most frequently included Warszawa, Gdańsk and Kraków, while the capitals mentioned with the lowest frequency included Opole, Zielona Góra, Kielce and Gorzów Wielkopolski.

Public health problems were addressed by Tomasz Michalski who, in Chapter 2 (Mortality rate in voivodship centres), discussed the variability of mortality rates in the voivodship centres by the disease type, gender, and age; he also tackled the 2016 infant mortality rate. The analysis presented in the chapter was aimed at revealing patterns underlying the mortality rates, based on analysis of 6 variables: actual deaths, age-normalised deaths, death structure similarity measure, excessive deaths of males, infant mortality rate, and infant mortality rate structure. The analysis showed the absence of any pattern that could be associated with a voivodship centre location, size or other parameters. It was only the actual and age-normalised deaths that were found to be much higher in cities of formerly highly industrialised areas (Łódź, Katowice).

The level of public safety as measured by the crime rate is discussed by Natalia Sypion-Dutkowska in Chapter 3 (Crime rate in voivodship centres in Poland). She calculated the population size-normalised crime intensity index for 2013–2017, overall and broken down by crime type (criminal offence, fraud, road traffic crime, and crime against family, life and health, property, and freedom). The indices allowed to divide the cities studied into 3 groups. In addition, the author typified the voivodship centres using a score-based assessment system. Each city was assigned a score related to its crime intensity index: those cities with high indices of crime of a given type scored 3, the intermediate and low levels of crime intensity indices scoring 2 and 1, respectively. The results are presented as radar maps, grouped by the degree of similarity. The voivodship centres studied were found to differ substantially in their crime rate structure, with 6 groups being distinguished. Most voivodship centres showed their crime rate to be at the intermediate level. Katowice turned out to differ markedly from all other centres in maintaining almost all its indices at a high level; other highly unsafe voivodship centres include Poznań and Wrocław, with 4 indices at the high level. The three smallest voivodship centres in the western part of Poland (Gorzów Wielkopolski, Opole and Zielona Góra) showed high crime rate intensity indices. In contrast, all the indices of Rzeszów were low. Generally, the crime rate was higher in the western part of Poland, compared to that in the eastern part of the country.

The three subsequent chapters are syntheses of their respective content matter, the syntheses being approached in a manner differing from that applied so far. The approaches chosen attempt to apply, to empirical urban studies, notions widely known in economic, social and humanistic sciences, but seldom operationalised and verified. These notions include urban sustainability, urban personality according to the Big Five model of personality, and concepts of urban robustness, fragility and antifragility as proposed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Chapter 4 (Strategies of sustainable development of voivodship centres in light of the SWOT analysis) deals with sustainability problems tackled by strategic documents of individual voivodship centres. The author, Jacek Rudewicz, quantified in detail the SWOT analysis results contained in urban growth strategies in the context of sustainable development principles. Lublin is disregarded in the chapter, as the city’s strategy lacked the SWOT analysis. The first objective of the chapter is methodological in nature: Jacek Rudewicz strove to develop and test a method with which to quantify information presented as sentences and paragraphs in the local development strategy documents. The analysis addressed the most important part of those documents, i.e., the SWOT analysis. The second objective was to analyse the SWOT results and look for patterns in their structure. The SWOT results were analysed from the standpoint of their responding to problems described in the economic, social and environmentally sustainable development subsystems. While analysing the strategies, Jacek Rudewicz observed SWOT analysis components that could be assigned to additional groups of problems. They concerned the urban space and questions related to a city’s importance in the context of its metropolitan area and on a wider scale (e.g., regional, national, international). Results of the analyses demonstrate differences in the weight assigned to individual problems of sustainable development by most of the strategies. The SWOT analyses examined addressed primarily the socio-economic components, much less attention being paid to questions associated with the nature, environmental protection and spatial planning.

Chapter 5 (Personalities of voivodship centres in Poland) is an attempt, undertaken by the author (Przemysław Łonyszyn), to apply a methodological approach known in psychology, the five-factor model of personality (the Big Five model) popular among psychologists, to geographic research. Such approach is a pioneering one in Poland. Based on similarity and dissimilarity of traits examined. the author divided the cities studied into 6 personality classes.

Chapter 6 (Voivodship centres – robust, fragile, antifragile) by Marek Dutkowski proposes still another alternative approach to urban studies. Following Taleb (2010, 2013) who put forth the notions of robustness, fragility and antifragility as properties of complex systems determining their responses to external stressors, including strong and unexpected ones (“black swans”), the approach proposed makes it possible to classify urban centres into robust and fragile. The chapter strives to apply Taleb’s notions to 18 Polish voivodship centres. Traits which would make it possible to regard a city as robust (with a positive or negative growth trend), fragile or antifragile are determined. Robust cities hardly respond to external stressors which usually do not perturb their long-term development trend. Fragile cities initially retain their potential and standing, but lose them rapidly. In contract, antifragile cities initially lose their potential and standing, but subsequently – as a result of internal structural changes – rebound and develop fast. The empirical analysis presented in the chapter covered the period of 1970-2017, i.e., almost half a century. During that time, Poland experienced five strong external stressors which more or less profoundly changed the country’s economy, social structure and politics: the so-called December events in 1970; the emergence of the Solidarity movement in 1980; the martial law in 1981-1983; the demise of the People’s Republic of Poland in 1989 and the onset of systemic transformation; the establishment of 16 large self-government-based voivodships in 1999; and Poland’s access to the European Union in 2004. The metric used for the empirical synthetic assessment of a city’s situation and its changes was the contribution of a voivodship centre’s population to the total population size of all the voivodship centres. The analysis of graphs depicting changes in the respective contributions, with concavity and convexity criteria as well as positive or negative linear trends introduced by Taleb, divided the 18 voivodship centres into four groups. Three centres with 100–400 thousand residents (Białystok, Rzeszów, Zielona Góra) emerged as robust, with a growing (positive) development trend, whereas three centres with populations larger than 400 thousand (Katowice, Łódź, Poznań) were deemed robust with a declining development trend. The analysis showed as many as 7 voivodship centres (Bydgoszcz, Gorzów Wielkopolski, Kielce, Lublin, Olsztyn, Opole and Toruń) to be fragile; they were mostly the capitals of historical regions, important regionally, with populations of 100 to 400 thousand. In contrast, five centres having substantial international and national standing, functioning as metropolitan areas, with population size larger than 400 thousand each (Gdańsk, Kraków, Warszawa, Wrocław and Szczecin) turned out to be antifragile.

Translated by Tertesa Radziejewska