Environmental hazards as a driver of urban

Environmental hazards as a driver of urban abandonment in Poland Iwona Kantor-Pietraga a Mirek Dymitrow b Robert Szmytkie c René Brauer d Jolanta Pełka-Gościniak e Tomasz Spórna a and Robert Krzysztofik a

a

University of Silesia, Faculty of Earth Science, Department of Economic Geography, 41-200 Sosnowiec, 60, Będzińska street, Poland b Department of Economy and Society – Unit for Human Geography, School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, P.O. Box 630, 405 30 Gothenburg, Sweden c University of Wroclaw, Faculty of Earth Science and Environmental Management, Institute of Geography and Regional Development, 51-137 Wrocław, University Square, Poland d Department of Engineering Design and Production, History of Industrialization & Innovation Group, Aalto University, P.O. Box 14100, FI–00076 Aalto, Helsinki, Finland e University of Silesia, Faculty of Earth Science, Department of Physical Geography, 41-200 Sosnowiec, 60, Będzińska street, Poland

Abstract The modern society is often perceived robust enough to withhold the calamities of adverse natural forces, while the phenomenon of complete settlement abandonment might seem as a thing of the past. However, due to an increased rate of environmental change, the issue of human vulnerability becomes all the more pertinent. In this presentation, we focus on the emergence of rural landscapes as a result of urban abandonment due to environmental hazards, here seen as an element in the functioning of the concept of environmental drivers. The underlying assumption is that a characteristic of environmental hazards is their spatial and temporal constancy of impact, whereby processes and phenomena having taken place in the past have their analogies in the present. In order to generate considerations for future research and policy development, there is a need to pay greater attention to the dangerous relationship between humans and the natural environment, not least by drawing lessons from the past. The presentation clarifies the dynamic interactions of drivers and their progression through various stages of urban abandonment with both an analysis of some general trends and an in-depth examination of three selected case studies from Poland. It has two objectives. The first one is to identify the historical role of environmental drivers in the process of urban abandonment, while the second one is to contribute to the typology of environmentally related processes of urban abandonment in order to better identify future calamities. In the first respect, the findings reveal that the relation between environmental hazards and urban abandonment is pertinent in regions with specific geographic conditions and pertains only to certain categories of urban settlements. In the second respect, by drawing on these findings, we propose some alterations and amendments to McLeman’s comprehensive model of settlement abandonment in the context of global environmental change. Keywords: Poland

environmental hazards, environmental drivers, landscape change, rural–urban,

Kantor-Pietraga, I., Dymitrow, M., Szmytkie, R., Brauer, R., Pełka-Gościniak, J., Spórna, T. and Krzysztofik, R. (2014): Environmental hazards as a driver of urban abandonment in Poland. Permanent European Conference for the Study of the Rural Landscape, 8–12 September 2014, Gothenburg, Sweden.