More and more municipalities are starting work on the General Plan, and in many cities the collection of comments from residents is underway. However, the spatial planning reform still raises many concerns and keeps local governments and planners awake at night. - City planning cannot be reduced to an Excel table, says Edyta Damszel-Turek, director of the Gdansk Development Office. And Piotr Czyż, a lecturer at PG adds: only big players will be able to participate in the process.
More municipalities are starting work on the General Plan. Many of them have already adopted resolutions to proceed with the work, and the solicitation of comments from residents has ended or is still underway in Gdansk, Bydgoszcz, Kielce, Gdynia, Częstochowa, Katowice, among others. Aleksander Miszalski, the mayor of Krakow, recently decided to extend the deadline for submitting applications.
When, in July last year, President Andrzej Duda, signed an amendment to planning and zoning regulations, the then Minister of Development and Technology spoke of a "Copernican revolution in planning."
We are simplifying the regulations so that municipalities quickly and efficiently adopt general plans and local plans," Waldemar Buda said.
a number of problems. What about spatial order?
The changes are intended to facilitate and speed up spatial planning in municipalities. In practice, the reform, the main change of which is the replacement of municipal studies of conditions and directions for spatial development with new documents, i.e. general plans, causes a lot of concern and spends sleepless nights for local government officials, who have been given little time to prepare for the reform.
The Association of Polish Cities, which has been pushing for a change in the zoning law, has been critical of the draft.
- This is not the shape of the law we wanted," commentedSenator Zygmunt Frankiewicz, president of the Union of Polish Cities, last year. - Many of our demands have not been met. However, one must admit that there are also elements in the amendment that are worth supporting and appreciating. The law will certainly give rise to a number of problems, and it should be amended quickly to eliminate provisions that are still a problem and will be a problem in the future.
The Union of Polish Metropolises, on the other hand, stated back in 2002, in response to the bill, that the reform "will not solve many of the fundamental legal problems of the current planning and zoning system" and will not contribute to stopping the exurbanization trends that have been going on for more than 30 years.
It does not solve the issue of more economical use of space for development, shifting the burden of municipal authorities' actions from uncontrolled expansion of development to revitalization measures and replenishment of development in already developed areas, the UMP enumerated.
Piotr Czyż, an architect, lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture at the Gdansk University of Technology, and president of the association Inicjatywa Miasto, in an interview with AiB, stresses that the enactment of the General Plan is a titanic task that has little to do with spatial order.
This is because it turns planning into a kind of plan that coordinates the activities of the municipality and developers - instead of shaping spatial order. In the whole process, we forget about those who will want to build something for themselves. The demand for residential development space and the ability to build so-called associated developments will become crucial. It will be difficult for the average citizen to discuss these arrangements," explains Czyz.
He adds that planners will work at tables and use algorithms to calculate areas, absorptive capacities of development, and no one will discuss whether what results from these tables will make a real city.
In addition, the information will be presented in an insanely complicated way. Only the big players will be able to participate in this process," says Piotr Czyz.
fight against time
There will be many changes. First, the amendment introduces a new planning tool - a general plan, passed obligatorily for the entire municipality. The plan's findings will be the basis not only for adopting local plans, but also for issuing zoning decisions. With that said, local governments have been given as little time as possible - the deadline for enacting the plan is January 1, 2026. If they don't make it, after that time they won't be able to issue zoning decisions. The arduous work is to be helped by grants that can be used for the preparation and adoption of a municipal general plan, a municipal revitalization program and a local zoning plan. A total of more than PLN 868 million is planned to help implement the reform.
The plan will indicate the intended use of a given area; it will also set municipal standards for the availability of social infrastructure, such as elementary school and public green spaces. The document will divide the city into zones, for which, among other things, the maximum height, area and intensity of development and the minimum biologically active area will be specified. A new feature will be a so-called integrated investment plan drawn up at the request of the investor, which will eventually replace the "lex developer" law.
Thebig change is that the master plan will not be found on paper. The digital document, which is uniform across the country, will consist of spatial data and justification.
"City planning cannot be reduced to an Excel table," he said.
- One of the elements of the spatial planning reform was to standardize the way all municipalities in Poland prepare planning documents. Thus, the Ministry aimed to maximize the automation of project activities, limiting the role of planners, their creativity and dehumanizing the entire planning process," says Edyta Damszel-Turek, director of the Gdansk Development Office. - Since the beginning of the work on the new law, the urban planning community has stressed that city planning cannot be reduced to an Excel table. Meanwhile, we are getting successive ordinances that parameterize urban planning in great detail and rigidly. I am referring, among other things, to how to calculate the demand for new development in a city.
The BRG director adds that during related analyses, planners take into account the existing state and demographic projections, and only then can they indicate new areas for development.
- It may therefore turn out that the realization of the vision of developing the surroundings of the PKM Gdańsk Południe stops - where we want to introduce new residents and services - will be jeopardized , because what we want to write down in future planning documents will exceed the value calculated by the formula. An alternative solution would be to give up private investment areas, but this involves compensation for investors; such a scenario is therefore unrealistic in practice," stresses Edyta Damszel-Turek.
Time is extremely short, and Gdansk, whose planning office has about 100 employees, is still in a better situation than small municipalities that have no permanently employed planning teams.
The provisions of the law contain many ambiguities, inaccuracies and factual errors, which is why we regularly request the Ministry to indicate the correct interpretation of the regulations. What is also worth noting - the latest regulation to the law dates back to May 16 this year, which proves that the reform is not prepared comprehensively," the BRG director points out.
In Gdansk, the collection of applications to the master plan (more than 330 have been received so far) runs from April 15 to June 14.
- Although the law stipulates 21 days, we have extended this time to two months," says Edyta Damszel-Turek. - We have until December 31, 2025 to prepare the master plan, which means that the draft should be voted on by the city council session around October 2025. It's not feasible to prepare the document well in such a short time.
