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This article raises the issue of potential possibilities for an establishment of the district with the capital in Miastko, which is the town of ten thousand residents, located in Bytów district. Miastko was already a capital of the unit in the past, but this function was not restored in 1999 or later. Based on assumptions from the period of shaping the current administrative division and the functions of the centres in the rank of the capital of the district, distinguished in the literature, in confrontation with the contemporary role of Miastko in the settlement network and its range and strength of functional and spatial relations with surroundings, the level of provision of services for the local community (including administration) was determined as well as the strength of connections between this centre and the surrounding communes. For the purposes of the article, the indicator of communication linkages was constructed, which was used as one of the measures of the size of functional connections between neighbouring communes and Miastko. All the considerations are set in the context of the demographic potential of the possible unit and the regional distinctiveness of the Middle Pomerania, including administratively as the Middle Pomerania Province. The undertaking of this topic is related to the constant need to discuss the shape of the administrative division in Poland and the willingness of the scientific community to formulate recommendations for decision makers in this regard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of the study is to determine the leading trends in changing administrative boundaries in Poland. Based on 194 Regulations of the Council of Ministers concerning the changes of boundaries and granting city status, which covered a total of 1,383.8 sq. km, multidimensional analyses for the years 2010-2020 were conducted, and their results were referred to territorial reforms in Europe and Poland. The analyses provided the basis for selecting the leading trends, including: (1) the 'new wave' of the restitution of city status (from 2018 in the new fast-track mode), resulting in quantitative changes within 3rd-tier units, (2) a significant increase in the area of cities and city counties primarily caused by annexations in suburban zones and establishing new cities, and (3) the politicisation of the process of changing boundaries, especially in the years preceding local government elections. The trend of unit fragmentation observed in the 1990s has disappeared. The initiators of the changes of administrative boundaries are still predominantly local elites and rarely the inhabitants of communes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this article is the study of centre–periphery intraregional development disparities using Poland's largest and most diversified Mazovia Province (Mazowieckie Voivodeship) as an example. The economic downfall of the Radom subregion, in comparison with the booming Warsaw agglomeration, clearly illustrates the polarisation of this province. A research question was if the location of the Radom subregion in Mazovia Province is a significant factor of its relative regression. In order to answer this question, selected development indicators of Mazovian subregions have been compared with their counterparts from surrounding provinces. Research results have shown that a subregion's location in a big and diversified province is a significant factor of intraregional centre-periphery development discrepancies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The administrative division of Poland changed several times over centuries, and the last decades witnessed a few significant border shifts. Socio-economic or political criteria usually created the foundations of proposed new administrative division, while historical criteria were generally ignored. The author postulates that borders' historical durability itself should be evaluated higher than it was to date, because it supports the creation of objective regions, provides political stability and reinforces the formation of regional identity. The basis for the analysis was the overlapping of 21 maps showing the external borders of Poland and the borders of administrative units of the first order between 990 and 2020. The map-based comparison has revealed that a surprisingly high share of present borders follows former borders. This provides strong support to the postulate of ceasing further changes in Poland's administrative division and border changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cognitive aim of this study is to point to the optimum number of local government units and the optimum boundaries of spatial units in Poland with the assumption of minimizing the cumulated theoretical travel time to all settlement units in the country. The methodological aim, in turn, is to present the use of the ArcGIS location-allocation tool for the purposes of delimitation processes as exemplifi ed by administrative boundaries in Poland. The rationale for the implementation of this study is that number and the boundaries of units of all levels of Poland's current territorial division are far from optimum in the light of minimization of accumulated theoretical travel time to all settlement units in the country. It may be concluded that it would be justifi able to increase the number of voivodships from the current number of 16 to 18. Besides it would be necessary to introduce modifi cations in relation to units with regional functions. In contrast, the number of districts and communes should be reduced. A continuation of this research may go in the direction of including analysis of public transport network in the research, creating in this way a multimodal set of network data. This would illustrate, apart from the potential itself resulting from the infrastructure, also the actually existing connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]