The issue of protection and development of the cultural landscape is an integral part of spatial planning at all levels. Progressing from the nineteenth century, interest in natural and anthropogenic landscape over the years has become the basis for conducting this research and the creation of a series of documents. Their result was to legitimize the principles of protection and landscaping by acts of planning. Advanced action in this area conducted by the European countries are beginning to exert more and more emphasis on setting the protection and development of the cultural landscape as one of the main objectives of planning in Poland.

Using the Wałbrzych agglomeration housing estates—once the most important mining and industrial region in Lower Silesia—as an example, this article illustrates the specific significance of the design of green spaces, including urban layouts, and the issue of protecting unique trees and green spaces in the concepts of estates from the early modernism period after the First World War in the years 1919–1927. This article tries to deepen the knowledge on the origins of the design solutions of public and private greenery systems while considering natural, landscape, and social needs. This study complements the information gathered so far in the field of forming green areas in modernist housing estates and highlights the importance of this issue in complex urban design. The Wałbrzych housing settlements are crucial because they were among the first of their kind, not only in Lower Silesia but also in the whole of the Weimar Republic. Based on literature and source studies, it was possible to reconstruct design ideas concerning the composition of green areas in most housing estates in the discussed area. The most interesting ones were presented and broken down into the landscape-related and functional aspects of the use of greenery in housing estates. This made it possible to select specific solutions applied by designers in order to indicate sources of inspiration and theoretically developed rules which then and now seem to be extremely adequate.

The article is the first attempt to gather information on the beginnings of using green elements in urban compositions in Lower Silesia and border areas, in the former Neumark and Lusatia. It presents Baroque urban arrangements with the use of green ground floors, tree espaliers and avenues, from the earliest ones—occurring in the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War—and the solutions applied in private municipalities in the Habsburg, Wettin, and Hohenzollern states, which were recovering from war damage, to urban developments at the end of that period, in the areas already under Prussian rule and its strict regulations. A comparison with the achievements of European urban planning in this field allows us to trace the paths of inspiration, but also to uncover some innovative achievements.