Post-industrial areas, despite often showing immense damage and high soil contamination, equally often stand out via many positive assets, displaying immense potential. Post-industrial areas, in most cases, commemorate the modernisation and development of a country’s market in urban space. It is expressed in surviving buildings and urban complexes, many of which possess high historical and aesthetic value. We reviewed the literature, identified gaps and demonstrated that this subject is relevant and topical. Insofar as analyses of the urban and architectural structure of post-industrial heritage and assessments of their potential use appear often in the literature, we found that scholars rarely discussed redeveloping post-industrial areas via housing projects. The publications, methods and tools we discussed lacked solutions that could support decision-making in redeveloping post-industrial areas into housing while accounting for the needs and requirements of all stakeholders. Our initial study was based on an online survey performed among a group of specialist experts with close ties to the Polish construction market. Due to the specificity of decayed and degraded areas, any action taken entails high risk and requires a broad range of analyses, which are often not carried out due to said specificity. The main focus of our study was to determine the need to develop a new tool and the necessity of accounting for aspects that directly affect housing projects to be sited in post-industrial areas. As a result, we demonstrated that Polish practitioners displayed a need for a tool to be developed that could aid in decision-making and assessing the potential of redeveloping post-industrial areas into housing areas and that would account for the legal, organisational, technical and economic aspects and that of market analysis.

Extending the life cycle of heritage buildings through their adaptive reuse can ensure their survival and is concordant with the policy of sustainable development. Selecting a new form of use for heritage building adaptive reuse projects is a multidimensional process that can be significantly aided by multi-criteria decision-making approaches. In this paper, the authors have proposed a hybrid form of structural analysis, which is a formulation of a multi-criteria approach to the analysis of complementary forms of use for a complex of historical buildings, to be used during the early planning stages of adaptive reuse projects for heritage building complexes. The approach has been demonstrated on the example of the Boyen Fortress complex in Giżycko, Poland. The outcome of the analysis indicated that the highest share of floor space to be adapted should be dedicated to exhibition spaces, which is justified concerning cultural heritage benefits. This approach can be of significant aid to decision-makers during adaptive reuse project planning phases, thereby facilitating the continued survival of heritage sites.

This paper presents the geography of the historic central district of Kraków, Poland before, during and after the first wave of the 2020 pandemic. It describes how the disneyfied main part of the UNESCO heritage site of universal values turned into a ghost town as functional changes were turning into physical ones amid restrictions. From the results of pre-pandemic processes (that, as we argue, turned the city into its disneyfied version), to the lockdown (that later revealed itself to be but the first one in a row), to the post-lockdown recovery, these changes are presented in modified figure-ground diagrams with accessibility being defined by both tangible and intangible properties. The results are set against the background of the city’s current policies regarding economic recovery, mobility and accessibility to urban green areas. As an attempt to address the present vulnerability of the once resilient historic city centres—of which Kraków Old Town is a luminous example—this paper tends to be a voice in the debate on the post-2020 planning and the strategies we will need to face the subsequent waves of this, or other, pandemics as well as consequences of climate change.

This article explores the historic development of greenery in market square spaces using the example of the Polish town of Zakliczyn in Lesser Poland. Contemporary Polish conservation policy aimed at preserving a public space’s historic values is often at odds with the needs and demands of the general public, whose members appear to be in consensus that urban public spaces, especially market squares, should feature more greenery. This study traces the spatial development of Zakliczyn’s market square throughout the last 150 years based on historic cartography and iconography, as well as contemporary orthophotomaps, and demonstrates that greenery in this historic market square is indeed a relatively recent phenomenon, although scant fragments of it did appear as early as immediately before World War II. It also contrasts the greenery in market squares from the People’s Republic of Poland period (1947 to 1989) with the most recent revitalizations occurring during the past 5 years.