why is it that pretty much every single polish city has 3x the countryside inside its limits than actual developed city
why is it that pretty much every single polish city has 3x the countryside inside its limits than actual developed city
49 comments
Is it a bad thing?
Usually it’s because of taxes. More people within borders, more money.
There’s probably some legal/budgeting mumbo jumbo that makes it easier to just put everything inside the city, like for people commuting – if it’s inside the city, then city is the only gov managing the trains/busses etc.
Residents pay the property tax to Gmina (the smallest administrative unit) and the income tax to Powiat (the mid administrative unit, multiple Gminas create single Powiat). Big cities as mentioned Wrocław, Kraków or Gdynia (check Szczecin as well, lots of fun there) work as both Gmina and Powiat.
It’s just profitable for the city to incorporate nearby villages, as the city will gain a lot of money in taxes. Also villages often can profit from being incorporated into the city with more spending on infrastructure, better public transport etc
Pytasz mnie skąd o tym wiem. Nie wiem. Bredzę
It’s an old-fashioned need. Water supply, and grazing land for the aurochs
Probably also to increase % of territory with forests/parks etc. So it will seem greener on a database.
We think big and plan optimistic.
we live in the woods with polar bears
tax reasons, but also water supply and connection to public transit are a factor
Tomaszow Lubelski my town 😅
Many villages became de facto middle-class suburbs, with their inhabitants commuting daily to the city centre. It makes sense for them to pay taxes to the city’s coffer and contribute to the infrastructure.
Also, sometimes there is an important business/piece of infrastructure just outside the city limit, that generates massive tax revenue, so cities have extra incentive to incorporate it into their limits. A good example here is Opole with its power plant.
Same thing can be said about the USA for example. Half of the land in the middle is uninhabitable yet state owned and governed.
buildings cost money to build, trees are free
I don’t know but it’s awesome.
You have two options to make more people live in your city:
1. Be interesting city
2. Just eat villages close to the city
Plus many nearby villages are “sleeping places” for people working in this particular city, so it’s kinda ongoing war or something
Wroclaw manages to both have a bunch of empty land inside the city limits, and have a large portion of the local population outside the city limits.
I live in Kraków and I really want to go to the farthest point on the eastern side (Wróżenice) by bike when it’ll be warm enough
But it’s almost two hours from the place I live
Everyone gangsta until Zielona Góra
We like green and we like bread
There are few things at work here, but from what I know it’s a result of territorial reform in ’73, which was meant to eliminate one whole territorial unit, and create city-voivodeship. At least that’s the case in Kraków, which mostly can be seen in the very east of the city and south. In the west it mostly runs along the lines of important historical sights such as Abby of st. Bernard and Sowiniec Hill, and in the north it’s just more or less in line with actual city border
farm land feeds the city. also green is pretty
a lot of this “countryside” are just single family houses where every person goes to school or work in the city, so there’s no real insentive to create a separate administrative unit when the big city already takes care of the water electricity and public transportation and can just extend the services few kilometers out, besides the people in those quasi-suburbs pay taxes directly to the city their entire lives revolve around
Mostly it’s just ego thing. Local political can feel more important becouse they gvern such big city. Don’t remember right now, but there was city major whose main goal was to make his city surpas certain population number, and he done that by expanding city borders to absurd places.
Also beeing part of the city rise land value, so developers and thier friends in city halls benefit a lot.
why does it bother you so much
Cuz the countryside close to a city is better than the city ?
Fake news… I don’t see Białystok as an example
Have you seen American cities, especially those that grew after the invention of the automobile? Buildings taller than 3-4 stories can only be found in the downtown. Most people live in single family houses among the trees.
So that any time you buy something from olx its a fucking god forsaken zadupie in the fucking woods or something. I swear anytime I bought something from olx in wroclaw it was the fucking outskirts.
In case of Gdynia it’s wooded hills, not flat country, so it’s harder to develop, and also, we like our cities checkered with forest in the Tricity, although the traffic congestion is a downside to that
It’s kind of crazy, like cities with 200k population are huge with forests and mountains in between them bielsko biala for example
It’s probably more efficient when it comes to taxes and infrastructure. In the US, I live in a city of 200,000, we have 3 suburbs of 10-20k people each with their own mayors, city halls, their own public transit systems etc. But when it comes to water treatment and power generation they’re on our system. So essentially there are 3 extra city halls with people that don’t do much work but still draw salaries out of our taxes.
Historically it was a way for the socialist Poland to artificially increase urbanization rate of the country, which was one of the KPIs they’ve goaled themselves against. Lots of these borders are remnants of these times.
More recently, though, it’s just makes administration easier. Compare that to e.g. French cities, where often the borders of the municipalities haven’t changed since the Roman times. In Lyon for example the city border crosses through buildings and goes through the middle of the road. If Lyon wants to build a bypass, they’d have to petition the central government so that it forces the suburbs to build it for Lyon etc.
Uh you don’t know about the Agenda
They gather taxes from villages and then build shit in main city without giving anything in return to places around. I live near place like that and there’s not even way to commute to city without using a car because all busses roam around city.
Kokotów😀😀
Warsaw doesn’t have that though.
Why is it that 18 of the top 20 cities with the highest air polution in Europe are in Poland?
It’s a way to increase taxes on population. Most of the time when a village gets absorbed into a city, people get angry because their taxes will go up.
It’s having administrative perks. There different tasks required of local government of each level (City, County, Voivodeship). Big cities are incorporating City and County tasks (hence City with County rights or Miasto na prawach Powiatu). It’s only natural that those cities are big enough in size to justify incorporation of additional civil servants workforce, as their responsibilities are also includes transportation, geodesy or land management.
It’s just a administrative division.
Each part of the land is divided between administrative units, until it became other administrative unit’s problem. Like in eftermentioned Krakow, the southern division between powiat Krakowski and Wielicki, currently the suburbian areas already merged and without markings would be easy to miss.
If the areas outside of strict, developed area would be left as no-mans-land no true infrastructure would be built there for investments or so, it would at the same time crowd up the cities and left surrounding areas dead.
Because we can
When cities grow, they grow by absorbing nearby gmina (smallest administrative district in Poland) with all its area, so if said gmina has a lot or rural land the city will also grow with that land included in one go.
Lublin keeps steady at 147 sq. km for almost last three decades. This is due to prevention to urban sprawl. But seems today to limit industrial business and keep it out of the city limits.
Maybe zoom in the map on that southern green area and find the answer by yourself.
For Gdynia it makes sense. Inside city you have Landscape Park protected by law 🙂
TBH satelite maps lies also, becouse green areas like Swoszowice looks like empty on this screen when in real its pretty dense.
Because of a highly advanced urban planification. (😂)
Because fuck urbanization