SPATIAL PROCESSES OF POLYCENTRIC URBAN DEVELOPMENT IN CENTRAL EUROPE

Abstract

Polycentricity is an issue that emerged as a spatial theoretical construction during the 1990s and that has indicated the increasing diversity and complexity of the enlarged European urban landscape. Since then the theory of polycentric urban development is widely considered as a panacea for structural weaknesses of cities at the European periphery and in the Western-European core in the same way. For a set of regions with dense urban pattern (Randstad, Rhine-Ruhr metropolis, the Flemish Diamond) in the European core region polycentricity became a development strategy to cope with negative consequences of extreme concentration. On the other hand, cities at the European periphery are provided with an adequate scale and size of agglomeration economy but purely embedded in urban networks. For them, polycentricity means a bundle of strategic actions to increase their availability in order to counterweight dominance of the robust European mega-city regions. As cities started to acknowledge political gains of polycentric networks, the concept has become part of the European spatial policy agenda since the end of 1990s. Under the framework of European spatial development policy, polycentric urban network is referred to as crucial requirement for sustainability and competitiveness and became a policy goal of spatial planning. Since 2004 the European economic area has been enlarged by peripheral countries of Central (and Eastern) Europe, where cities show solid marks of socialist urban development. Due to accession the urban network of Europe has been extended by overweight national capitals of predominantly monocentric intra-metropolitan structures. Moreover, the internal and external connectivity of urban network in Central Europe has remained limited since the fall of iron curtain which resulted in a weak hierarchical structure of Central European cities dominated by Vienna as the leading business headquarter. Beyond poor inter-metropolitan cooperation socialist urbanisation took also a long-run effect for intra-metropolitan relations, characterized by a core-city dominated metropolitan system of unidirectional flows directed exclusively to the monocenter. Scientific results on the current development of Central European urban network are however hardly available or theoretically poorly grounded (as polycentricity is conceived rather as a political conception). The Polyce project funded by Espon aimed at filling the gap of knowledge regarding the Central-European polycentric relations by using a common methodology. Polyce investigated the morphological ad relational policentricity in Central Europe with both macro- (inter-metropolitan relations among the cities themselves and to rest of Europe and overseas) and micro-indicators (inter-metropolitan structures). It has been found that path-dependency of post-socialist cities is still a robust phenomenon as distribution of population and jobs in the metropolitan area of Prague, Bratislava, Ljubljana and Budapest was to a large extent concentrated to the core city in 2001. On the other hand, poly-directional relations among the core city and metropolitan subcentres or among subcentres – that could be undeniable facts for polycentric restructuring – were scarcely evolved in those four cities, except for Vienna. Vienna appears as a polycentric metropolitan region where despite the core-city dominance in population, functional relations have been evolved and strengthened among metropolitan centres and a plurality in directions of commuting flows emerged. Budapest and Prague, on the other hand, are prototypes for post-socialist monocentric metropolis with low level of reciprocal flows among metropolitan centres. Some evidences for restructuring towards a more polycentric and poly-directional metropolitan structure could be detected in Budapest. According to Polyce findings the role of metropolitan subcentres has been strengthened and their ‘catchment area’ has been widened over the last decades. These trends clearly showed the restructuring of monocentric urban regions as it is described in the scientific literature. Further investigation is, however, needed regarding the geographical directions and dimensions of polycentric restructuring that is taking place around Central European metropolises.