After a week of discussions with students and faculty in UB’s urban planning program, tours of Buffalo’s historic architecture and neighborhoods, and a special visit to the city’s former Polish enclave on the East Side, Łabuz says she is struck by similarities between her native land and an American post-industrial city navigating many of the same dynamics.

The potential for internationally comparative research on urban form and spatial policy across diverse metropolitan areas is one of the outcomes of Łabuz’s recently published research, which breaks new ground by quantifying settlement patterns in selected Polish urban areas and correlating sprawl to planning interventions like local land use decisions. The study sets a crucial precedent for verifying urban development policy effectiveness, identifying gaps and inefficiencies in regulations, and aiding cities in preparing for population growth, increasing built-up area, economic shifts, and climate resilience.

Titled “Using the Weighted Urban Proliferation (WUP) approach to measure the effects of planning strategies on urban sprawl in Poland,” the article was published earlier this year in the scientific journal Cities, and co-authored by Łabuz, Rafał Blazy, also of the Krakow University of Technology, and Daniel Hess, professor of urban planning at UB.  

“Our goal was to objectively measure the phenomenon of urban sprawl in selected metropolitan areas and determine whether current planning regulations in Poland effectively limit this disorderly development,” says Łabuz, whose research focuses on spatial planning and the sustainable transformation of cities and regions.

Hess, an expert on urban spatial dynamics who collaborated with Łabuz on the research when he was a 2023-24 Fulbright Scholar at Krakow University of Technology, says the study is novel in its use of metropolitan regions as functional urban areas, providing a more effective framework for analyzing urban growth than administrative city boundaries.

“Our findings explore the diversity of urban forms in Central European cities and find new applications for the Weighted Urban Proliferation method, measuring urban sprawl and planning policy to allow for comparisons of metropolitan areas across institutional, political, and spatial contexts,” says Hess, who organized Łabuz’s visit with support from the Global Research Scholar in Residence program of UB’s Office of International Education.

The emergence of sprawl in Europe first gained attention in academic literature, especially in the early 2000s. While Central Europe tends to be associated with urban development patterns shaped over centuries, the post-socialist era since the collapse of communism in 1989 significantly shifted spatial development across the region through liberalized land markets, decentralized governance, and increased access to and reliance on private mobility. Urban sprawl impacts spatial dynamics by fragmenting urban form, diminishing the efficiency of land use, straining environmental and transportation systems, and elevating the costs of delivering infrastructure and services across vast, dispersed areas.

In Central European countries like Poland, sprawling development often manifests as vast tracts of monotonous housing developments and a “creeping disarticulation” of built form, social life, and ecological integrity, according to the report. These new zones are predominantly single-purpose, usually residential, and supported by substandard road networks without public transit, forcing residents to travel significant distances to access essential services.

A principal advantage of the WUP method, which integrates three indicators – the proportion of built-up land, the degree of spatial dispersion, and land consumption per capita – is its multi-scalar approach and focus on urban form, according to Łabuz.  

“The unit we choose to measure urban sprawl matters. The WUP method is important because it does not look at density alone. Two places can have density, but one can be compact and the other dispersed. WUP captures that difference,” says Łabuz.

The study’s adaptation to Poland’s complex post-socialist urban fabric takes the analysis one step further, assessing both urban dispersion and its governance context. For this part of their analysis, the authors zero in on the 164 municipalities within the four regions, examining the percentage of the metropolitan area covered by local development plans (MPZPs), and the number of local land use and zoning decisions (WZs) made between 2009 and 2018, the last year for which raster (or spatially organized) data are available. WZs are rulings issued by a mayor of a village, town, or city, allowing changes in development regulations.

Findings from their analysis reveal diverse sprawl patterns shaped by differing historical contexts, coverage by development plans, and the intensity of local governance decisions.

Rzeszow (ROM), a planned metropolitan area first proposed in Poland’s 2004-2006 National Development Plan, shows the greatest levels of sprawl (with a WUP of 1.118, the highest of all four regions), low levels of MPZP coverage (7 percent), and a high volume of WZs (more than 55,000 decisions between 2009 and 2018).

The most compact region is Krakow (KOM), with a history shaped by Austro-Hungarian traditions in monocentric urban structures, balanced industries in knowledge, tourism, and culture, and more recent suburban expansion. Its WUP score is only 0.147, with high levels of MPZP coverage (86 percent), and far fewer WZs compared to ROM (approximately 28,000).

Falling in between are the metropolitan areas of Upper Silesian-Zaglebiowska Metropolis (GZM) and Wroclaw (WROM), both shaped by German and Prussian-Polish influences such as polycentric and infrastructure-focused development. GZM, which retains its industrial roots, is the second most sprawling region, with a WUP index of 0.787, nearly 26,700 WZs, and MPZPs governing 66 percent of land area. WROM, characterized by medium-sized metropolitan expansion with a dominant city and surrounding satellites, is the second most compact region, with a WUP of 0.595, MPZP coverage of 63 percent, and nearly 25,000 WZs.  

“A closer look at each region shows that spatial fragmentation, rather than absolute development density, is the main driver of sprawl. Furthermore, clustering of dispersion in municipalities surrounding core cities suggests that peripheral zones are the primary arenas of sprawl, indicating that planning strategies focused on central areas may unintentionally intensify outward development pressure,” says Łabuz, who combines academic research and planning practice through her Krakow-based ASTA-PLAN architectural and urban planning office. 

Notably, the study finds the number of WZs per square kilometer exert a stronger impact on sprawl dynamics than the extent of MPZP coverage. “The results suggest that planning tools currently in use in Poland are insufficient for limiting urban sprawl, raising important questions about the efficacy of MPZPs in densely populated metropolitan settings and suggesting a need for adaptive spatial policies that account for both urban density and land use efficiency,” according to the report. “For scholars and policymakers accustomed to integrated metropolitan strategies, this fragmented and reactive approach exemplifies the structural limitations of post-socialist urban planning practice.”

“Metropolitan-level coordination is largely missing in Poland. Also, in Poland, there are currently no national programs explicitly dedicated to counteracting urban sprawl,” adds Łabuz, who plans to disseminate results by inviting local government officials to academic and professional conferences focused on sprawl and pushing for coverage of the research in the mainstream and professional press in Poland and internationally.

Looking ahead, Łabuz and her co-authors suggest extending their analysis through international comparisons of regions in Europe and North America and rapidly growing cities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Additionally, the authors recommend incorporating post-2020 data to examine whether global events such as COVID-19 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 have influenced urban sprawl in Poland.

She says direct experience of an American post-industrial city like Buffalo reveals important international parallels. She and Hess have already begun working on a new study to identify and compare urban sprawl hotspots along southern Poland’s A4 highway and the New York State Thruway in Upstate and Western New York, where post-industrial cities have similar trajectories.

“Buffalo is a very attractive city, and I’m amazed by the efforts under way to protect its historic buildings,” says Łabuz, whose tour of the city included the Art Deco Buffalo Central Terminal and a first-hand look at plans for its reuse. She adds that Poland, too, is investing in the adaptive reuse and preservation of former industrial warehouses from across the country’s historic periods of turbulence and prosperity.

“Patterns of sprawl in Western New York mirror those seen in Poland’s metropolitan areas, but there are also important differences we can take a closer look at,” she says, noting, for instance, that car ownership in Poland is a major barrier to combatting sprawl, with some households owning more cars than there are family members. Also, in terms of urban form, Łabuz observed during her visit that big-box shopping centers in the United States feature more car-dominant layouts as compared to the smaller, more walkable center designs commonly found in Poland.

At the conclusion of her week in Buffalo, Łabuz reflected the experience and what it means to her..

“My time at Buffalo has reinforced something I already believed: the most interesting research questions are often shared across countries and cultures. Although I study spatial processes in Poland, many of the challenges we discuss here are global, including urban growth, sustainability, mobility, and quality of life."

“This experience has encouraged me to further develop research that combines advanced spatial analysis with practical planning applications and international collaboration. Science becomes most meaningful when it connects people, places, and ideas across borders,” she continues.

Adds Hess: "We are grateful for support from the UB Office of International Education to facilitate our joint research between Buffalo and Krakow and set the stage for expanded cooperation."