In September, Gliwice will host the 7th Polish Urban Planning Congress under the theme “Urban Planning at a Crossroads.” We discuss the paths we have to choose from (and why one leads into a dark forest and the other into the fog) with Professor Piotr Lorens, City Architect of Gdańsk and a member of the Congress’s Program Council.
Polish Urban Planning Congress, September 23–25, 2026
© Organizers’ archive
Ola Kloc: The special housing law, known as the “lex deweloper,” has been in effect since 2018, but it will soon be replaced by Integrated Investment Plans (ZPI)—do you think this is a good move?
Piotr Lorens: Definitely yes. The special act not only allows for the rezoning of land for residential purposes—which is its main purpose—but also facilitates discussion of the architectural and urban planning concept, something no previous planning instrument offered. A local zoning plan specifies parameters or building lines, but leaves no room for discussion about what a given concept actually looks like. Such a possibility existed only at the building permit stage, but since this is an administrative decision, very few authorities were willing to engage in debate about the quality of architecture. With the “lex deweloper,” it turned out that the quality of architecture could be discussed as early as the planning permit stage. This process for obtaining approval to carry out a development project, properly supported by local procedures, makes it possible to secure funding for public purposes associated with the project. These purposes are mainly related to education, but also to public spaces, green areas, recreation, and other such elements. This procedure also allows—provided, of course, that it is well-organized at the municipal level—for public dialogue.
In Poland, there are a number of cities that have attempted to implement this procedure, including—for example—Wrocław, Warsaw , and Gdańsk. Importantly, the “lex deweloper” does not mean automatic approval of whatever the developer proposes. This is clearly illustrated by the example of Wrocław, where only one-quarter or one-fifth of the applications moved forward. This shows that the “lex deweloper” has proven to have much greater impact in terms of quality control and ensuring that a given investment meets the local community’s expectations than is the case at the local planning stage.
It therefore seems to me that this procedure, already sanctioned under the Planning Act [as Integrated Investment Plans—Ed.], rather than under a separate special housing law, definitely has a good chance of success. All the more so because it provides an opportunity to secure funding for numerous projects essential to the proper functioning of the municipality—not only schools, public spaces, and green areas, but also other public purposes, which are defined quite broadly in the Act. So I think this is a promising instrument that I foresee having a bright future.
Ola Kloc: So, can we say that we’ve learned something over the years? After this exercise and gaining the ability to negotiate the terms of what kind of architecture will be built, have municipalities taken on the role of an active player in the development of urban space?
Piotr Lorens: Perhaps municipalities haven’t fully taken on the role of an active player, but they’ve definitely been placed in a more active role than before. However, it’s not the municipality that’s calling the shots; the initiative still lies with the developer or private investor. On the other hand, the municipality has greater control over both the appearance of the development and how it is received by the local community.
We must also remember that there are still many local zoning plans in effect that were adopted as long as 15 or 20 years ago. When a development project begins to be implemented based on these plans, it often sparks public opposition. However, this is a consequence of implementing planning decisions adopted 20 years ago. Times were different back then; the world has changed significantly over the years, but the law is the law—so if it permits certain activities on private property, why shouldn’t the owner carry them out? Of course, it’s always possible to amend the plan; however, in such a case, the amendment process would, first of all, take five years, and second, in many instances, would entail compensation for the investor, who is being prevented from carrying out a project that was permitted under the previous version of the plan.
Ola Kloc: But the ZPI will also require a zoning plan amendment.
Piotr Lorens: Absolutely, except that the ZPI is a new plan, which means we don’t have to deal with the consequences of decisions made in a completely different era. Of course, it may happen that the ZPI is adopted, and someone begins construction in 20 years, and then we’ll be “grappling” with this issue all over again.
Ola Kloc: Another factor that will significantly impact the space around us will be the open-ended WZ permits being issued in droves today, just to beat the deadline before the general plans are adopted.
Piotr Lorens: Unfortunately, yes. I believe this is one of the biggest flaws of this planning reform.
Ola Kloc: For plots that are now receiving WZ decisions, won’t there be any tools in the future to influence the design of the development?
Piotr Lorens: A WZ permit depends on the context. If our current context is low-density, scattered single-family housing with very low development parameters, and we want to build developments with higher parameters and greater density, we won’t be able to do so based on a WZ, but rather on a plan—either a ZPI or a local plan. I think most municipalities will choose the ZPI. Of course, this will be done by those municipalities that are capable of handling this procedure in terms of concept evaluation, public dialogue, or negotiations with the developer.
Part of the “lex deweloper” and the ZPI is an urban planning agreement, which involves more sophisticated financial instruments, such as bank guarantees. On average, I see the potential for municipalities that lack planning or investment departments capable of handling this issue to successfully manage such a situation.
Ola Kloc: In that case, some kind of user guide for these smaller municipalities would be helpful so that they, too, can take advantage of this planning tool.
Piotr Lorens: I’m not saying that smaller municipalities won’t use it; I’m just saying that they’ll face difficulties. It’s similar to the situation today with WZ-tki, which in some places there’s no one to prepare. In larger cities, where there are urban planning offices and large urban planning and architecture departments employing dozens or even hundreds of people with specialized degrees, there are people available to handle the current flood of applications for WZ-tki. But the situation is completely different in a municipality, where there is, as the saying goes, just one part-time urban planner working two days a week.
Ola Kloc: Where does this disparity come from?
Piotr Lorens: It’s a systemic problem that should have been addressed 10 years ago. Unfortunately, we’re now seeingthe consequences of the deregulation of the urban planning profession, the dissolution of the Chamber of Urban Planners, and the halt in the influx of new professionals into the field.
Ola Kloc: What elements of the special housing law should be avoided when implementing the ZPI?
Piotr Lorens: It would be advisable to avoid fragmentation of space. A characteristic of Polish spatial planning is that we think either on a micro or macro scale. A study or a general plan are documents of a very high level of generality. Theoretically, a general plan addresses individual parcels, but very often they do not form a coherent whole—a vision for a larger area. However, this is not the role of a general plan; its purpose is to record in the urban planning registry the parameters of a given plot—in terms of development intensity, building height, percentage of built-up area, and so on. Only then do we have either a local plan or a ZPI, which—as is often the case—are created for a single plot. Consequently, the relationship between the two is practically nonexistent. What is needed, therefore, is a vision for shaping the larger whole. In fact, it is precisely because of this lack of vision that many applications for the “lex deweloper” have been rejected.
I have the opportunity to serve on the Municipal Urban Planning Commission in Wrocław. We encountered a situation where the owner of a large, multi-hectare site of former industrial facilities divided the plot into smaller pieces—more or less sensibly—and “lex deweloper” applications were prepared for each of these smaller pieces. The Municipal Urban Planning Commission and the Planning Department were very critical of this—it’s as if we wanted to sell a car, but the customer only wanted to buy the steering wheel and one wheel. That’s not the way to go.
Ola Kloc: So what’s missing from the Polish spatial planning system?
Piotr Lorens: Something we’d call area- or district-level master plans. This instrument doesn’t have to be adopted by the municipality—though it probably should be—but above all , it should serve as a guideline outlining how a larger urban entity should be organized. Only from these guidelines could specific proposals for the ZPI, the “lex deweloper,” or traditional spatial planning emerge.
Ola Kloc: So, in the optimal scenario—moving from the macro to the micro level—we have a general plan, master plans for specific areas, and we address individual plots within the framework of, for example, the ZPI. However, currently we have general plans and ZPI that do not require the developer to take the broader context into account.
Piotr Lorens: And that’s the problem. It may turn out that planning departments, or the mayor—who is the authority responsible for drafting spatial planning documents—or the investor themselves will be forced to prepare such broader studies. It may also turn out that this issue will be addressed in some informal way, but again—this is a problem that is easier to solve for larger cities. In the case of smaller cities and municipalities, it may prove to be a challenge—both for municipal authorities and for the investor.
Ola Kloc: What are your biggest concerns regarding the ZPI?
Piotr Lorens: First and foremost, that ZPIs will be very poorly anchored in the broader vision for shaping a given part of the space, and also that municipalities will believe that general plans, studies, or local plans (of which the ZPI is a specific form) are set in stone once and for all. Well, no— planning is a continuous process. In my opinion, given the fragmented nature and high degree of discretion in general plans with regard to individual parcels, we’re in for a never-ending process of revising them. It will be a bit like a never-ending story, comparable to cleaning a large house—as soon as you finish on one side, you can easily start on the other.
Ola Kloc: Why?
Piotr Lorens: Because various conditions and investment trends will change. Right now, no one is building offices or shopping centers because it’s not profitable; everyone wants to build apartments. In a moment, it may turn out that the opposite is true, and we’ll have to revise all the planning provisions again. Then it may turn out that new regulations will be introduced—for example, regarding environmental issues—and we’ll have to address that topic again. There can be many such factors driving change. Public expectations may also change.
Ola Kloc: There’s also a certain disconnect between how master plans—which are based on various algorithms—are created, and how development strategies—which lack these algorithms—are formulated…
Piotr Lorens: We’re dealing here with a certain misunderstanding of the roles of both. In an ideal world, we would first develop a strategy that defines the directions for shaping the municipality’s functional and spatial structure, then apply that to urban planning indicators—primarily those related to housing and green spaces, and only on that basis do we draft the provisions of the general plan.
The provisions of the general plan are the only ones that specify exactly where what can be built and in what quantity. After the first public reviews of the draft general plans, a flood of disgruntled landowners emerged who would like to develop their plots differently. I therefore suspect that this system, which in theory should work, may break down in the relationship between the landowner and the decision-making body—that is, the village administrator, mayor, or city president and their decision, as well as the city or municipal council that sanctions that decision. And again—while in larger cities the distance between an individual landowner and the city or municipal council is greater, and it is therefore possible to weigh the interests and conclude that the public interest requires one decision or another, in smaller municipalities, where everyone knows each other, it may turn out that making a change, failing to make one, abandoning a proposed change, or balancing the public interest can be extremely difficult. This has been the case for 30 years, ever since the 1994 Act on Spatial Planning and Development came into effect.
Ola Kloc: Around the same time as the “lex deweloper” was introduced in Gdańsk, Local Urban Planning Standards were adopted—what are they, what is their purpose, and how have they worked out?
Piotr Lorens: Local Urban Planning Standards are established under the Act; they are a separate resolution of the municipal council. One of the problems we’ve faced so far in the spatial planning system was that no one had established programmatic guidelines regarding issues such as the number of square meters of green space per resident or the walking distance from a bus stop to a school. The result was development in the so-called middle of nowhere, where you have to drive a few kilometers just to buy a loaf of bread. Local Urban Planning Standards are designed to combat this phenomenon and introduce certain principles for shaping the built environment, expressed as minimum standards for distances to commercial and social services, recreational areas, and green spaces.
Not all municipalities have taken advantage of this, but in Gdańsk, this solution has worked very well—it is a municipal council resolution, a binding law, and thus gives us a strong argument in discussions with investors.
Ola Kloc: The 7th Polish Urban Planning Congress will be held under the telling slogan “Urban Planning at a Crossroads.” Where do we stand now, and what paths do we have to choose from when it comes to spatial planning?
Piotr Lorens: I think this crossroads isn’t entirely defined. It’s not as if going left will take us to one place, and turning right will take us somewhere else. It’s more like a path into a dark forest or a road into the fog. The question is, what lies at the end of each path? Unfortunately, we don’t know that.
We are currently dealing —through the ZPI, in fact— with an attempt to reform the investment system, that is, shifting the costs of implementing not only the investments themselves but also the infrastructure necessary for their creation, including social infrastructure, onto the shoulders of investors, and consequently onto customers, because, after all, no investor subsidizes these projects out of their own pocket. The question, however, is whether the ZPI alone will save the world, especially since the system’s inertia is significant.
Ola Kloc: What does that mean?
Piotr Lorens: We have local zoning plans that have been “on hold” for 20 or 30 years, with all the consequences of the planning decisions made at that time. We also have new, mass-issued decisions on building conditions. The question is how we’ll deal with this inertia in the future. We last grappled with planning inertia in 2003, in the form of a law that effectively eliminated all local plans dating from before 1994. However, the effects were the opposite of what was intended— at one point, it turned out that some municipalities were left without any planning documents. To this day, there are municipalities that rely solely on WZ-t documents. Now, of course, this will come to an end, and we will have to deal with many new situations.
Ola Kloc: For example?
Piotr Lorens: First, how to deal with this planning inertia and how to steer the system back on the right track. Second, given the lack of master plans or any broader overarching vision, the challenge will be how to address the absence of an urban vision. It’s not included in the general plan, it rarely appears in local plans, and it’s completely absent from individual zoning decisions. Shaping the urban fabric through the implementation of individual, isolated projects is unlikely to lead to the holistic urban effect seen in classic examples of urban design. The third issue concerns rethinking the methods of implementation and execution. Until now, we have operated under a system in which the municipality builds the infrastructure, while a private investor capitalizes on the value of the plot—that is, the municipality bore the expenses, while the investor “reaped” the profits from the investment. This will change in the context of the ZPI, but it is unclear what the implementation methods will be—will these be private, public, or public-private partnership investments? Another issue is participation—that is, how to ensure the local community’s involvement in spatial decision-making without falling into what has been described in the literature as the “participation nightmare,” that is, a situation in which the proverbial Mrs. Zosia and Mr. Kazimierz halt a multi-million investment by simply saying “no, just because.” And finally, the last issue— how do we tie all of this together into a unified system?
Urban development has three pillars: participation—that is, the process of discussing what should happen and how; planning—that is, who designs what, how, on what scale, and using what methods; implementation—that is, how we envision carrying out the entire project.
A good example of how we tried to bring all this together is Centrum Południe in Gdańsk. The starting point was an outdated concept based on the idea of developing so-called “big boxes”—that is, large supermarkets and office buildings. We began with a debate involving residents and investors on what we actually need in this location. Based on the conclusions from these discussions, a design competition was held, which yielded various concepts illustrating how this area could be developed; these concepts then served as the basis for urban planning guidelines for the local zoning plan, which is currently in the final stages of approval. Since this is municipal land, we have full control over how it will be developed. We plan to develop it through a public-private partnership.
Ola Kloc: And how can this be done on private land?
Piotr Lorens: In Gdańsk, we have the example of Młode Miasto, where we’ve been trying to steer the development process of this area for a good twenty years. Recently, we’ve had increasingly positive experiences collaborating with all stakeholders there, and there are over a dozen private owners in the area.
Ola Kloc: So how do you bring these private investors to the negotiating table?
Piotr Lorens: This may be an unpopular view, but it seems to me that we should definitely strengthen the role of the public sector—city or municipal authorities—as the proverbial driving force behind such a process. As city authorities, let’s not limit ourselves to formal planning decisions; let’s strive to actively moderate and steer this process, even if only through institutions such as the city architect or urban planner. However, this would require statutory authorization of these entities’ powers in planning and investment processes. This issue still lies ahead of us, though—as the experience of some cities shows—it is also possible through local regulations introduced by the mayor. So—where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Ola Kloc: Thank you for the interview.
The Polish Urban Planning Congress will take place from September 23 to 25, 2026, in Gliwice; detailed information about the event and participant registration is available on the TUP website: LINK
