Browsing by Author "Dymitrow, Mirek"

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Degraded and restituted towns in Poland: Origins, development, problems
(Copyright 2015 by University of Gothenburg, 2015) Krzysztofik, Robert; Dymitrow, Mirek
One of the less known problems in settlement geography is the issue of so-called degraded and restituted towns. This lack of reconnaissance, however, is perhaps less the result of the towns’ scarcity than their specificity of being ‘awarded’ or ‘deprived of’ an urban label by means of strictly socio-political actions. Degraded and restituted towns, hence, are spatial units made ‘rural’ or ‘urban’ instantaneously, irrespective of their de facto state along what is widely considered a gradual path of (de)urbanization. Instead, they become compartmentalized into two constructed spatial categories that have survived the onslaught of material transformations and philosophical repositioning. While ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ are conceptual binaries that certainly need to be treated with caution, their cultural salience may cause tangible consequences within national administrative systems that abide by a formalized rural-urban distinction. This issue becomes particularly important for settlements that clearly transcend any imagined rural-urban divide, i.e. those, whose material and immaterial characteristics seem counterfactual to their assigned category. It is also crucial in formal practices designed to avert such counterfactualities, but whose randomness of approach more creates confusion than helps straighten out a historical concoction. Both processes, nonetheless, lend ‘urbanity’ and ‘rurality’ a resonance of objectivity that justifies their use as guides for a host of developmental endeavors, despite subverting a much more intricate reality. Degraded and restituted towns are direct derivatives of this. Drawing on the above-mentioned irreconcilabilities, the aim of this book is to present and scrutinize degraded and restituted towns through the example of Poland, where these towns occupy a special niche. For one, Poland, due to its chequered and variegated history, is home to a conspicuously large number of degraded (828) and restituted (240) towns; for another, Poland’s relentlessness of formalizing ‘urbanity’ as a category of statistical, political and cultural guidance has a direct bearing on the lives of the towns’ residents. Realizing the intricacy of degraded and restituted towns in the face of commonplace rural- urban ideations, the editors and the 17 contributing Authors of this book have made an effort to capture the towns’ complexity with special foci on their shrouded origins, developmental specificities and incurred problems. Owing to the involvement of researchers from different scientific disciplines and subdisciplines, the undertaken project has helped elucidate the problem from multiple perspectives: spatial, social, demographic, economic, environmental, historical, architectural, cultural, legal and philosophical. Allocated into 17 chapters, not only have the presented interpretations allowed for a first interdisciplinary synthesis on the topic, but they also helped outline some prospective directions for future research. Moreover, collecting materials of such diversity into an amalgamated whole has helped identify specific discourses that enwrap the concept of “urbanity” when seen through its oscillations within formal contexts, and to which degraded and restituted towns serve as expendable game pieces. By combining knowledge arrived at through epistemologically different approaches, the incremental contribution of this book as a whole could be summarized in two attainments: a) extending theoretical frameworks used to study degraded and restituted towns in terms of definition, conceptualization and assessment of predispositions for future development on account of their spatial, legal, socio-economic and historical characteristics; b) initiating an anticipated discussion on a number of important and current topics related to the practices of degradation and restitution that have not received adequate attention, e.g., the urbanity-vs.-rurality paradox, the changeability of human settlement forms vs. the consequences of rigid spatial categorizations; the role of various actors in shaping the socioeconomic reality under the guise of an ossified binary; or identifying spatio-conceptual conflicts as future challenges for local, regional and national policy.
Degraderade städer - En studie av urbanitet hos städer i Polen som förlorat sina stadsrättigheter
(2013-04-17) Dymitrow, Mirek; University of Gothenburg. Human and Economic Geography; Göteborgs universitet. Institutionen för kulturgeografi och ekonomisk geografi
Using the example of 55 former towns in Greater Poland, the author investigates the belief that towns formerly deprived of town privileges are the most likely to be qualified as future formal urban entities. This paper approaches the subject of urban deprivation and restitution with a multiaspectual study of the concept of urbanity. Since a preponderance of Polish degraded towns possess a prominent urban physical structure, the study focuses mainly on urban morphology as a contributing factor to urbanity. Other approaches include the central place theory, demographic conditions and the role of urban perception. Taking into account Poland’s shifting geopolitical history the study also seeks to identify and explain spatial patterns of varying degrees of urbanity among the studied towns. A secondary spatial approach analyses the distribution of urbanity in relation to greater regional centers according to the concept of core–periphery. By applying an integrated index scale based on an array of scientific theories the study measures and classifies the present urbanity status of former towns. Given their overall high summary values the study verifies that former towns are highly predestined to have their town privileges restored. Finally, the prevailing inertia to restitutions of town privileges in Poland is discussed, concluding that lack of legal criteria as well as common ignorance are the main barriers hampering the evolution of a proportional urban network.
Rural/urban redux: Conceptual problems and material effects
(2017-11-20) Dymitrow, Mirek
Concepts are the basic building blocks of all knowledge, while the strength of the theories that guide any societal project is dependent on the quality those concepts. Contrarily, the utilization of questionable concepts will result in questionable material effects. As two of the oldest geographical concepts still in widespread use, ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ stand in stark contrast to the immense changes encountered by society over the last century, let alone decades. Steady, fast-paced transformations in the environmental, economic and social dimensions have rendered the rural/urban binary a contentious one – a conceptual vestige of sorts, whose blurred and malleable characteristics, immense spatial coverage and aspectual all-inclusiveness have come to form an odd marriage between bygone world views and a globalized 21st-century reality of interconnectedness. The aim of this thesis is to critically evaluate our use of the concepts ‘rural/urban’ in order to help erase the contagion of indifference attached to them in a recalcitrant reality of admissibility. This compilation thesis consists of five theoretically and methodically diverse papers and a summative part inspired by a much wider range of ideas. By combining geographical perspectives with insights from critical theory, cognitive psychology and STS, this eclectic work addresses the phenomenon of rural/urban thinking using a new syntax and a new argumentative narrative with the ambition to change the way that thinking is apprehended and acted upon. With a focus on performativity, constitution and implications of concepts governed by various subject positions and psychosocial factors, this work lays the groundwork for an under-researched dimension of ‘rural/urban’ – that of the human condition – amidst an exceptionally rich conceptual literature on what ‘rural/urban’ “is” or “means”. Three basic conclusions stem from this work. Firstly, anyone talking about ‘rural/urban’ is performing it, and we have no mandate to project ‘rural/urban’ performances onto “people out there” and then evaluate how ‘rural/urban’ is like by examining those people’s actions. Secondly, ‘rural/urban’ are ridden with too many problems with regard to their basic conceptual constitution that their signification is unlikely to converge with what we are trying to explain. Thirdly, since ‘rural/urban’ as spatial concepts are often used with regard to human activities, there is a risk of conflating land with people, and thus forfeiting the core of our approach. Given these three important conceptual problems there is also the likelihood that ‘rural/urban’ may tacitly contribute to the retention of some pressing societal problems. This thesis makes the case for reconfiguring our relationship with familiar conceptions of societal organization. Its principal contribution is to help facilitate decisions on whether ‘rural/urban’ are truly analytically contributory to a specific line of action or whether they serve merely as a cultural ostinato acquired by external, scientifically and societally undesirable, mechanisms.
The Hidden Face of Urbanity - Morphological Differentiation of Degraded and Restituted Towns in Poland in the Context of the Efficacy of the National Administrative System
(2012-10-04) Dymitrow, Mirek; University of Gothenburg/Department of Human and Economic Geography; Göteborgs universitet/Institutionen för kulturgeografi och ekonomisk geografi
This master’s thesis deals with the concept of urbanity in Poland, where it coincides with a judicial, administrative understanding of urbanity. A specific of the Polish administrative system is that it utilizes town privileges – a mediaeval remnant – to symbolically define formally urban areas. Such a practice inadvertently creates confusion in terms of what urbanity exactly means. Town privileges are widely associated with historical events, such as the 1869-70 administrative reform enforced by the Russian occupation of Poland, depriving 336 towns (75 %) of their urban status. The issue of foreign oppression, as well as Poland’s chequered relations with Russia, makes this particular loss of urbanity an important identity issue for the towns concerned. Loss of urban status is further emphasized by the fact that the lack of town privileges in Poland degrades a settlement to rural status, which – in this particular context – may be disadvantageous in terms of prestige, economic growth, community cohesion and preservation of cultural heritage. Although 40 % of the reform towns have to date been restituted, recovery of urban status has been hampered by an array of obstacles, which in turn could be tantamount to the undermining of the meaning and the purpose of the concept of urbanity. Such a situation cannot be satisfactorily accommodated today, particularly when granting urban status may be restricted by specific official prerequisites. One of the most important constituents of urbanity in governmental evaluations today is the attribute urban morphology. However, urban morphology – along with the derivative attribute urban consciousness – is considered to be the most difficult to assess, most likely as a result of its close association with the subjective arts of architecture and urban design. The difficulties in obtaining relevant data have resulted in these two attributes of urbanity being the least examined. Consequently, the task of this study has been to investigate how the concept of urbanity – as conveyed by the Polish administrative system – corresponds to de facto conditions in regard to the variable urban morphology. In order to conduct a large-scale comparative inquiry on the matter, a necessary intermediate – yet major – objective has been to assemble and devise an appropriate methodology for this particular task. Drawing upon a wide range of theories as well as observations of current trends and practices in urban design (including field studies in various degraded towns), I propose an approach based in part on eclectic methods (regarding town plan complexity and physiognomy) as well as a totally new methodology. The latter acknowledges market squares as the most important commercial, social, cultural, functional and symbolic hubs of small traditional towns, along with their crucial role as denominators of small-town urbanity. With the intent to moderate the impact of subjectivity inherent to traditional field-based observations (including approximation-laden impreciseness and human error), I have resorted to satellite imagery and aerial photography as primary sources of data subject to analysis. The new methodology was subsequently validated by field observations in 69 of the studied towns. The objects of study were the aforementioned 336 reform towns and the analytical basis consisted mainly of comparisons between the morphologies of restituted (formally urban) and degraded (formally rural) towns. An important finding is that although the restituted towns are generally morphologically more urban than the degraded ones, the problem is not in what the system includes but in what it excludes, as illustrated by the large number of degraded towns that fully meet the current criteria for urbanity. Inclusion itself may also be problematic as granting town privileges to units significantly divergent from contemporary urbanization standards automatically deepens the breach between de jure and de facto urbanity. In conclusion, the studied set of towns shows an immense morphological differentiation with extremes at either end of the rural-urban divide, and a distinct reshuffle of urban and rural units in its middle part. Previous studies have shown occurrences of continuum structures in various geographic contexts, particularly in regard to heterogeneous groups of towns; this study stipulates that continual morphological configurations occur just as much in sets of towns with similar morphogenetical backgrounds and histories. As such, I argue that the reform of 1869-70 can no longer act as an umbrella term affixed to towns that are ‘de facto urban yet unjustly rural’, but is rather a cloak of misinformation under which reactionary aspirations are allowed to flourish. Furthermore, I have examined the spatiality of current restitutions, taking into account factors such as diffusion of innovations, agglomeration proximity, territorial-administrative barriers and occurrences of city deserts, concluding that the lingering restitutional inertia is most likely the effect of a faulty system that permits the retention of the aftermaths of the old reform. I argue that the system is deceptive, counterintuitive and discriminatory, but also inconsistent in terms of susceptibility to manipulation, improper monitoring and lack of self-regulatory mechanisms. Last but not least, it renders a misconceived national urbanization profile, which nonetheless serves as a foundation for official statistics and the various developmental policies and strategies derived therefrom. It is argued that one way of improving the system could be through separation of the cultural element from the administrative arena.