Shrinking Cities in Poland: Demographic Perspective

Shrinking cities can be found more and more often in many places around the world. This is the result of many interrelated processes, including demographic changes, uneven and irregular economic development, changes in urban development and in the ways of using the land. The effects of these changes are reinforced by the processes of globalisation, European integration and related restructuring of local economies. This paper purports to present the issue of “shrinking†cities in Poland. The author has included a general characteristics of the process, considering only the aspect of changes in the population. A typology of population movements was introduced on the basis of a relation between the actual birth rate and the migration balance, whereas the typology was based on Webb’s procedure. The author has also made an attempt to classify the shrinking cities based on the definition adopted by the Shrinking Cities International Research Network (SCIRN). A detailed analysis was conducted on large cities with more than 100 thousand inhabitants and covered the period from 2000 to 2016.