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Today, the dimension of a city is defined by networking relationships. These, however, are not covered in the hierarchically-oriented planning of Wrocław. Spontaneous processes that affect the city, such as growth, densification as well as its shrinkage and disappearance, reveal inefficiency of the applied planning methods which have led to its disintegration into numerous small, separated fragments. Regardless of planning shortcomings, which concern the whole city, today Wrocław struggles with decentralization of the compact historical European city - and a new form of "in between-city" type of urbanity instead, which poses a challenge related to planning and designing the urban landscape. Areas owned by the city remain the biggest and perhaps the only field of interference with the city. They include streets, squares, pedestrian areas, thoroughfares, belts rivers, urban wasteland areas which, owing to their extent, have the potential to merge the city structure in terms of its composition and above all its function. This text is the second part of my research on green areas acting as "soft elements" that control the city structure. The first one focused on examining connections across the city. In order to present the full picture, the analysis included also links existing on a local scale. This paper investigates three selected areas of Wrocław freaturing diverse urban morphologies. Each case was considered with a view to find possibilities for converting empty, neglected lots into green areas. The primary goal was to test different strategies where green areas could be used to build connections for walking and cycling within the urban fabric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ASince the 1980's, and in Poland two decades later, cities have been subjected to a continuous and dynamic transformation. The city spaces have become places of global capital flow acceleration, and in the market-based economy they have been turned into a commodity. This situation has led to the feeling of powerlessness and lack of any visions for cities that would reach far into the future. With the impetuous and uncontrolled development of cities - growth combined with increased density, and shrinking and disappearance at the other end of the spectrum - the current planning methods have become insufficient. Despite appearances of development, Wrocław is a shrinking, peripheral city. Owing to the war damages, the post-war clearing-up demolition, economic weakness in the socialist economic system, and above all short-term, opportunistic and incoherent urban planning over the last 25 years, the city structure is split, fragmented and composed of several independent elements. On the two-dimensional plane, its organisation and operation is provided by the city transport system. However, its compositional layout and form are uncontrolled. The largest, and perhaps the only field of intervention into the city structure remain areas that belong to cities, such as streets, squares, pedestrian precincts, transport arteries, lines of rivers and areas of city wastelands, which owing to their range have the integrating / merging potential. In this text I probe into the possibilities of using green areas as "soft" elements for controlling the structure, for supra-local systems both at the level of the whole city and at the level of city districts and areas. In my proposals for strategies I treat Wrocław as a case study, whereas the strategies themselves do not intend to create any exhausting visions, but rather to show a new urban planning paradigm for city development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]