From Parking to the City: An integrated approach to the transformation of Zakopane city into a liveable and sustainable urban environment for its residents

Zakopane experiences mass tourism, which supports economic growth but also reduces the quality of life in the city. This is mainly due to the developed car dependency, the lack of coordination between spatial development and infrastructure, and the systemic promotion of private property at the expense of the public good, which is a phenomenon characteristic of post-communist countries.Zakopane needs a transformation of the mobility system in terms of reducing the presence of cars in public spaces in the city while developing a mobility system that includes the spatial specificity of the various urban fabrics in the city (Newman & Kenworthy, 2015). Only by changing the transport system the liveability of public space can be regained. Given the housing shortage in the city, the development of sustainable mobility also requires a sustainable development perspective. The strategy of spatial transformation towards sustainable mobility and development must be adapted to neoliberal administrative conditions with limited public budgets and weak bargaining power. Thanks to the method of research through design as “strongly contextualised research that participates in society” (Nowotny et al. 2010) , with the active participation of the stakeholders, a mobility system transformation strategy was developed based on the perspective of regional cooperation of local tourist municipalities, motivated by a special program of integrated territorial investments. Strategic actions in the long term, including the improvement of spatial quality, have to take into account other partnerships to achieve the goals: cooperation with the private sector.Strategic actions for improving the quality of public space require both new regulations for its formation and a decision-making system enabling the cooperation of various actors, which have been developed through the simulation of the pilot project.Thanks to this approach, the strategies for shaping the urban space, its regulations, and the way of implementation have been explored - together with the demonstration of how the needed transformations could look like in reality.Architecture, Urbanism and Building Science