The Socio-spatial Restructuring of Łódź, Poland

TLDR

Research on urban change in former centrally planned countries has mainly focused on capital cities, leaving a gap in understanding transformations in smaller urban centers. This study investigates the post‑socialist socio‑spatial restructuring of the second‑tier city Łódź, Poland. The authors analyze socio‑spatial data from Łódź to examine changes at macro and micro levels. The analysis reveals that Łódź undergoes socio‑spatial restructuring, with macro‑level stability but micro‑level dynamic segregation leading to fine‑grained fragmentation, so that depending on scale one observes either a stable structure or growing fragmentation.

Abstract

Most of the research on urban change in the formerly centrally planned countries has focused on the more prosperous capital cities of Warsaw, Prague, Berlin, Budapest and Tallinn. Thus, our understanding of on-going urban transformations in this part of the world is skewed towards a handful of urban areas. This paper takes a different approach by studying the post-socialist transformations of the socio-spatial structure of a second-tier city, based on data from Łódź, Poland. The results reveal the socio-spatial restructuring of Łódź at both the macro and micro levels. Most importantly, despite being organised at a wider scale by stable social areas, at the micro level there are dynamic processes of socio-spatial segregation throughout the city that contribute to the fine-grained fragmentation of social space. From an empirical perspective, this means that either a stable structure or growing fragmentation can be identified, depending on the scale of analysis.