Elsevier

Cities

Volume 25, Issue 2, April 2008, Pages 107-119
Cities

City profile
Gdańsk

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2007.11.003Get rights and content

The Baltic city of Gdańsk is world famous, having repeatedly played an important role in history: it was one of the dominant members of the Hanseatic League, it was the place where the first shots of the Second World War were fired and, as the birthplace of the Solidarity movement, it became an icon of resistance against communist rule east of the Iron Curtain. Today, like other large Polish cities, Gdańsk has to manage the challenges of being a late-comer in the international community of competing cities, yet undoubtedly also having to cope with the legacy of the last one and a half decades: an absence of efficient city policies in vital areas. City image-building involves the task of integrating a multicultural past. Challenges such as profound socio-economic and demographic change, notably an aging and shrinking population, and the resulting spatial repercussions such as suburbanisation and the need for inner city revitalisation – these in conjunction with the need for modernisation of the port and of the economic base – demand fresh strategies in the new context of EU funding opportunities.

Introduction

The old Hanseatic City of Gdańsk is a remarkable case of a Central European city struggling to define its place and standing in the modern city network. More than one and a half decades after the end of communist rule, this Polish city finds itself in a process of significant economic and demographic change and needs now to enhance its attractiveness for new business sectors as well as adapt its traditional port functions in order to remain the most important Polish port. However, the absence of pro-active policies in the years after the fall of the Iron Curtain in domains such as inner city regeneration and city centre development, infrastructure improvements, cooperation at the metropolitan level, and implementation of major urban projects, make activities in these very fields now more urgent than ever. In recent years, not least in the context of EU accession, these issues have been addressed by different strategies to enhance the city’s built fabric, competitiveness, and image. This last relies particularly on heritage, a reliance which may turn out to be problematic in a city possessing not only a glorious Solidarity legacy but also a multicultural past extending over several centuries. This profile aims at giving an insight into these processes which the city is currently experiencing (Illustration 1).

Section snippets

History

Over centuries, the history of Gdańsk (with the ancient German name of Danzig) was marked by the city’s strategic significance as a Baltic trade hub, yet also by its location at the crossroads of German and Polish political and cultural spheres of interest. Gdańsk was first mentioned in the year 997 AC as the castle settlement of “Urbs Gyddanyzc”, but it had been founded probably some 200 years earlier as a Slavic settlement at the confluence of the Vistula and Motława rivers (Cieślak and

Location and spatial structure

Gdańsk is situated on the Baltic Sea at the mouth of the river Vistula. It is the biggest city of Northern Poland and capital of the Voivodeship (Region) of Pomerania, established in 1999 in the course of the Polish regional reform. The question of the significance of Gdańsk in the Polish city hierarchy would require a general definition of that hierarchy, which is however still a rather controversial issue between Polish geographers. Yet there is no doubt that the agglomeration of Gdańsk is

Demographic and socio-economic situation

In the period of communist rule, Poland experienced a massive urbanisation process due especially to vigorous industrialisation policies in conjunction with one of the highest birth rates in Europe. Urban growth was so rapid that the provision of sufficient urban infrastructure and housing was never secured (Parysek, 2006). This changed however in the first decade after the fall of communism, when declining birth rates and the end of migration to the urban centres caused population figures in

Spatial development policies

Like all Polish cities, the City of Gdańsk became an independent municipality in 1990 with a city council and a city president, both directly elected. However it was not until the year 2001 that the City adopted its first “Study of Local Conditions and Perspectives for Spatial Development”, i.e. the document defined by the Polish planning law as the legal basis for long-term municipal spatial self-management. As unfortunately typical for Polish municipalities in the 1990s (Parysek, 2006),

Inner city revitalisation

Inner city revitalisation has been a burning issue in Polish cities ever since the decades of communist neglect ended, yet – and Gdańsk is again no exception in this regard – significant results are still missing. The problem is caused by the absence still of a legal basis for urban revitalisation, by the fact that old housing stock in Poland is strongly stigmatised – people who can afford it prefer to invest and move into new buildings preferably outside the inner city, and above all by a

Conclusion

The old Hanseatic city of Gdańsk is certainly one of the most interesting examples of a Central European city making its way into the 21st century. The city has to make the transition from heavy industry and mass production towards the knowledge and high technology sectors, while trying also to adapt its port infrastructure to the needs of a true Baltic trade hub. The need for cooperation within the metropolitan region and notably with the neighbour city of Gdynia is evident, yet progress is

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