ABSTRACT
The majority of the urban agglomerations lie in the southern and central parts of Poland, where a belt of so -called urbanized territory also runs. Before World War II Poland, as a predominantly agrarian country in which agriculture accounted for 45% of the national income, was among the weakly urbanized parts of Europe. In the sixties, when more than half the population was living in urban communities, the Polish People's Republic also became one of the "lands of cities". By 1970 there were twenty-four cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants, and around half the urban population and nearly a quarter of the country's total population lived in them. The strategies programmed development to the year 2000, and the State Planning Commission then worked out the "planning" version, which had a shorter time span, dealing with development to 1985. In the twentieth century we are passing through the agglomeration of urban settlement systems to the phase of their metropolization.
