For Central Europe – slowly awakening from the lethargy brought about by the coronavirus pandemic – the year 2022 began in the shadow of the brutal aggression of Russia against Ukraine. The crisis which had been going on earlier, has grown even more severe since that moment, affecting economies of many countries, therefore our budgets – both personal and municipal. In the global scale, the hitherto dominant challenges faced by our civilization, such as climatic changes, overpopulation, crisis of cities, have been augmented by the primeval daughter of mankind – the war (unfortu-
nately, a successive one). In view of the brutal destruction of many urban organisms and, primarily, human beings, on our eastern neighbour’s territory, we should not stand by and be passive, but ought to act practically as well as awaken a naturally real hope for recovering a normal life and rebuilding Ukraine’s infrastructure so heavily devastated by the war, including establishment of a new settlement system which will break with the Soviet tradition. We can safely put the thesis forward that this will be one of the biggest challenges to Europe in the 21 st century.
The present Volume 44 of Studia Miejskie undertakes to discuss similarly vital –although local – challenges researched by our contributors (fortunately, in a peaceful everyday reality). It opens with a case study of Kowary, the article considering the possibilities of optimization of the process of citizens’ participation in shaping the local policy of sustainable development. Also, based on a concrete instance, this time – Kalisz, the issue of applying a local revitalization plan as a potential instrument of spatial planning in revitalization-related actions is analyzed in the succeeding article. Then, in a review of literature related to the impact of breakthrough innovations on sociocultural development of cities, the Reader will find out about a broad spectrum of their influence on such elements of the sociocultural development of Polish cities as: social capital, migrations, cultural heritage as well as the regulations (both those binding and ones being amended), of the act on spatial planning and development, with a particular
focus on their impact on the still current problem of urban sprawl. The volume is closed by an article dealing with the challenging question of use of the cultural heritage of social modernism in Polish urban tissue, therefore the matter – which in the 1970s, provoked Professor Tadeusz Zipser to conclude: “[...] wherever I am, I am in Konin...”,
which describes the unattractive uniformity of the then Polish cities. May, then – as in the previous years – the reading of the articles collected in this new volume of Studia Miejskie offer an inspiration and be a source of high-quality
research knowledge to all who wish to sensibly and effectively create the space and reality around us.
Jan Zipser