Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 17th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview I. Working Group on Local Government Author(s) Dominika Wojtowicz Kozminski University Warsaw Poland Title Metropolies and big cities as "regions locomotives". Analisys of regional development strategies in Poland File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract Recent studies clearly show that the most important role for region’s development play big, modern, well connected cities. They are often called “regions’ locomotives”. Such situation leads to spatial polarization. Ireland is a good example of polarisation process that is a product of slow growth of the lagging regions and the rapid advancement of the metropolitan cores. As Castells says: “Metropolises govern the world, because they became the nodes of the “economy of flows”” [Castells M. (1997) The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture – The Rise of Network Society, vol. 2, Oxford: Blackwell]. Similar regional patterns can be found in Central and Eastern European countries. Capital city regions “escapee” the rest of the countries, and the regions that contain big cities follow them. The border regions – both located at the external borders of the EU as well as these located along the internal border, do display slow growth – at the same time these usually are less developed regions in all CEE countries. Thus divergence is a matter of fact, which may be attributed to the relatively fast growth that is concentrated mostly in capital and big city regions. The problem is how to take advantage of rapid grow of big cities so that the whole region or country could benefit from the spread effect. Poland like most of European countries is characterized by large disparities of growth level across regions and within regions. As the country joined European Union in 2004, the process of social and economical development can be increasingly supported by EU’s assistance funds. The new budget period for years 2007-2013 provides considerably more funds for the territorial self-governments to use. It must be stressed that from 2007 regional policy implementation system has been considerably changed – regions’ authorities were given wider scope of competence to run development policies. That is why regional policies differ within Polish voivodships which authorities could choose priority areas to support with EU’s money. Therefore the following questions:  how regions will use this unique chance to reinforce their development potential,  what part of this assistance will be allocate for development of regions’ big cities and finally  what kind of solutions (activities) are provided to strengthen competitiveness of big cities, become the fundamental ones. This paper presents an analytical description of the present situation in Poland. The author presents levels of socio-economic development of Polish regions and tries to explain what is the reason of those disparities by analising the role of metropolises and big cities in development of each region. The aim of this paper is also to compare different Regional Development Strategies operated and adopted by Polish voivodships. Author evaluates potential effectiveness of activities and policies addressed to regions’ biggest cities and tries to predict possible regional pattern for Poland for the next decade.
