HISTORY OF THE TOWN-PLANNING DEVELOPMENT OF BIALOGARD. PRINCIPLES OF CULTURAL HERITAGE PROTECTION

Bialogard is a small town in the central part of the voivodeship of Western Pomerania. It boasts of a centuries-old history, dating back to the Middle Ages, a well-defined town planning layout evolving from the early fourteenth century to the present day, and a complex and diversified development originating in the nineteenth and twentieth century; the two considerably older objects are the Gothic parish church and fragments of Gothic defensive walls, including the 'Wysoka' (Tall) Gate. During the Middle Ages, Bialogard was a ducal town with a castle erected on the spot of a Slavonic castle-town, rebuilt during the modern era for the purposes of an administrative seat. Only a few relics of the oldest buildings on Castle Hill have remained, as in the case of the burgher residences. The houses, destroyed by fires and wartime hostilities, were replaced upon numerous occasions, but the town-planning layout of the Old Town and the two suburbs: Karlinskie and Koszalinskie, has been retained. The traditional layout in Bialogard was expanded and partially transformed from the second half of the nineteenth century to the 1930s. The suburbs and new areas introduced into the city boundaries were filled with imposing town houses, villas, public utility objects, as well as industrial and non-residential buildings, frequently representing a high artistic rank, equal to that of the largest towns in Pomerania. The majority survived to our times, while the resources of historical residential development, demolished and transformed, continuously diminished. The appreciation shown for the value of cultural heritage by the present-day municipal authorities allows us to hope that the afore-mentioned adverse process will be halted. The town commissioned the Regional Centre for Monument Studies and Documentation in Szczecin to prepare a town-planning study focused on spatial development. Apart from an historical outline showing changes in the composition of the plan and buildings from the fourteenth to the twentieth century, the study in question characterised selected town-planning units, and proposed assorted principles of protecting town-planning premises, development complexes, individual buildings, and archaeological sites