ABSTRACT
This chapter overviews the of Polish and Czech second-order cities within the respective national settlement systems, and introduces the four case studies, Łódź, Gdańsk, Brno and Ostrava, together with their inner-city areas. The relative paucity of research on the impacts of transition on non-capital cities of East Central Europe led us to select four such cities for their investigations of the significance of ongoing urban population decline and household change for inner-city residential change. Throughout the post-Second World War period, the number of cities slowly increased as a result of administrative changes or population growth and, in 2007, the number had risen to 891 cities. In the post-socialist period, the economic recession, together with unemployment, became the main differentiating force of spatial change. Depending on their economic performance, Polish cities can be classified as winners or losers in the socio-economic transformation. Ostrava was originally a small town at the periphery of the Habsburg Empire, not far from the Moravian-Silesian border.
