Urban policy and the rise of gated housing in post-socialist Poland

Abstract

The aim of this article is to investigate regulations regarding housing and spatial planning to determine the extent to which these have influenced the development of gated housing in Poland since 1989. The focus is on how government policy with regard to spatial planning and housing, together with the law on property and ownership, influences the emergence and development of gated forms of housing in the country. Legal regulation documents concerning issues of housing and spatial planning between 1990 and 2013 have been studied. The article argues that the liberal policies and legal regulation in the country is resulting in a disregard for spatial planning and housing, but also the lack of integrated urban policies. Existing spatial plans are of a consultative nature and bear no regulatory capacity, at the same time as housing programmes and spatial planning in the country is strongly in favor of private investors and new construction. All these shortcomings have created a differentiated housing market, one in which housing developers maximize their profits by constructing gated housing complexes, combined with a tendency among those who have the means to move to newly built housing behind gates. The long period of developer-friendly policies and governmental support of purchasers of new construction, have resulted in increased popularity of gated communities in Poland and their spread to many Polish cities.

Residential Segregation in Warsaw and its Metropolitan Area in the Context of Changing Housing Policy

“…Research on the residential property market in Poland focuses primarily on changes during the transformation period and present-day alterations. Among the many papers on this subject are: a typology of housing developments according to social features by Smętkowski (2009), publications referring to changes in deployment of housing resources in Warsaw (Stępniak, 2014) and studies combining issues of socio-spatial diversity with spatial planning and housing policy (Górczyńska, 2014;Polanska, 2014). The second stream of research pertains to the relation between the housing market and the state, as well as to the so-called housing cycle (Lis, 2008(Lis, , 2012.…”

Gating as exclusionary commoning in a post-socialist city

“…Since the mid-1990s, Poland has become the leader among European post-socialist countries in terms of the rapidly augmenting number of enclosed housing developments (Polanska 2014). Increased popularity of gating in Polish cities may be explained both by contemporary deficiencies in housing and spatial planning and by historical conditions.…”

Gated Neighborhoods, Privatized Amenities and Fragmented Society: Evidence from Residential Experience and Implications for Urban Planning

“…The expansion of gated urban environments is a rising phenomenon in both the developed and developing world [1]. After initial widespread development in North America [2,3], gated neighborhood grows in popularity in Latin America, Eastern Europe [4][5][6], East and Southeast Asia [7]. As a globalized urban product that has been commonly observed by worldwide scholars [8,9], gated communities appear with widespread embodiments such as 'sealed residential quarter', 'walled feature' and 'enclosed management'.…”

“…This is particularly evident in cities like Johannesburg and Cape Town in South Africa where walled communities are a typical outcome of the server racial segregation. The gated environment, which is often the result of the privatization of urban space, has both positive and negative social consequences [6]. As gates and walls become more readily acceptable throughout the world, Li et al [11] (p. 253) have indicated that 'gating in, and of itself, is not a major factor' affecting resident's neighborhood attachment to a place.…”