One of my favorite Youtube Polish channels, Architecture is a Good Idea, did a clip on *urbanistyka łanowa* (field urbanism) in Polish suburbs and since I wanted to do a thread on it too, here it comes!
Why are all new housing estates in Polish suburbs long and narrow? 🧵
Let's start with understanding what a *łan* is. Historically, it has been a measure of area equivalent to a feudal peasant's farm.
In the modern sense, though, it usually means a very long and narrow farm plot that has access to the road on its narrow side.
The genesis of *łan* is that unlike in many other places in Europe, most of Poland never had the culture of majorat. Majorat is when of all children, only the eldest one inherits the farm. In Poland, all children inherited part of the farm, thus they had to split them.
And the way to split it is obviously in a way that allows road access to the road. Additional benefit of the long and narrow plot is that when you plow, you want to make as few turns as possible. Better to have a plot that's 300 m long and 30 m wide than a more square one!
But then comes the 21st century and Polish cities are sprawling. On this map, the redder the area is, the more new housing relative to existing one is being built. Except for a few major cities, it's all suburbs.
And where are they sprawling? To the rural areas, of course.
The developer wants to build a housing estate but it's really hard to get two or more separate owners to sell at the same time, so they end up buying the entire *łan* and building inwards. Like in Białołęka, a suburban Warsaw neighborhood which is the worst example of this.
Often, the farmer (or farmer's descendants) themselves divide up the farm plot and sell it to individual investors who then build single-family houses there. The road that leads to the plots further from the main road is narrow and often co-owned by house owners
This type of urbanism has its huge downsides. In essence, it's a main road with hundreds of cul-de-sacs connecting to it. Since the main road was a village road at best, they quickly become super congested.
The other problem, and the reason why I'm a little bit critical of American YIMBYs' anti-zoning dogma, is that since Poland lacks strong zoning, anything can be build there. You have single-family houses next to Polish equivalents of 5-over-1s, next to a car mechanic
In some extreme cases, like Białołęka, in the summer, there's no water above the third floor in Białołęka because water pressure is too low. It was planned for SFH but developers built multi-family buildings instead
Anyway, to wrap up, here are some extreme examples of *urbanistyka łanowa*.
1. Suburbs of the Silesian Metro Area
2. Suburbs of Wrocław
3. Suburbs of Poznań
4. Suburbs of Lublin
5. Suburbs AND city center of Łódź. Łódź is build on a grid but notice some buildings are twisted against it. These are former *łans* that haven't been bought en masse when the city was founded, and when the city expanded faster than anyone expected, they got sold and developed
6. Suburbs and outer districts of Kraków. Kraków has less blatantly visible examples because (a) it's more hilly, so *łans* don't always work there and (b) it's so chaotic overall that you don't even see the pattern that clearly
If you want to watch Architecture is a Good Idea's take on this phenomenon, here's a link to their Youtube video (only in Polish, unfortunately!):
And if this thread got you a little interested in Poland, it's architecture and urbanism, here's another good thread of mine taking on the public housing in socialist era:
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