Regional Disproportions in the Development of Medium-sized Cities in Eastern Poland

There are more and more new development challenges emerging in Polish cities and regions recently. Because of those challenges we can observe an increase of the role of cities and associated environments. The concept of cities’ impact on the environment is a result of many processes, such as: suburbanization, reurbanization, increasing population mobility, development of transport systems, innovation, or entrepreneurship. A city is a complex entity, it is a subject to dynamic changes, to understand which we need interdisciplinary knowledge or the combination of many different approaches along with an attempt to draw many conclusions. We can find numerous theoretical examples describing city-regional environment relations in the literature. In general, these models explain the relationship between economically strong cities (metropolis) and the regions. However, there is not much literature and research explaining the nature and strength of relationships with medium-sized cities. There are also very few ideas for developing the potential of medium-sized cities in polish national policy. The aim of the article is to present disproportions in the development of medium-sized cities in voivodships of Eastern Poland in 2010-2017. The author will also present the possibility of using a synthetic measure to assess and recognize the spatial diversity of medium-sized cities development