The concept of resilience has in recent years been one of the more commonly used urban development concepts. In the social sciences, the term is understood as a dynamic process that reflects a relatively good adaptation, irrespective of the hazards or traumatic experiences. It is linked with the concepts of risk, vulnerability and positive adaptation. The concept of resilience as used in the social sciences has been adapted by other disciplines, including research on the city, where the term is ambiguously and sometimes inconsistently defined. The aim of this study is to explain the term resilience, its reference to the city and to clear up ambiguities of the terminology related to the two lines of research on resilience in relation to the city as presented by the relevant literature: city resilience and the resilient city. Analyses show that both these terms, despite their widespread application, are at present imprecisely defined in the relevant literature and generally speaking used interchangeably, which makes their precise application difficult. In addition, the assumption that city resilience can be treated as a process that leads to a desired state of the resilient city, has not been confirmed. The correctness of the application of the second of these concepts (the resilient city) raises doubts, because it will probably never be possible to develop a city not vulnerable or fully resistant to various types of development perturbations.

Studying green urban infrastructure is important because of its ecosystem services, contributing to the welfare and comfort of citizens, mitigation of climate changes, and sustainability goals. Urban planning can increase or diminish the performance of ecosystem services. Despite numerous studies on the green infrastructure–services–planning nexus, there are very few concrete planning recommendations. This study aims to provide such recommendations for a broader audience by analyzing the dynamic of open green areas in Polish and Romanian cities, connected with its drivers. A novel approach including mathematical modeling and geostatistical analyses was applied to Urban Atlas and statistical yearbooks data. The results indicated that open green areas were lost and fragmented in all Romanian and Polish cities during 2006–2018. The drivers included urban built-up areas, population and density, the number of building permits, number of new dwellings completed, number of employees, and total length of roads. The study also revealed a tremendous lack of consistent datasets across the countries using the same statistical indicators. Based on the findings, planners should aim to preserve and develop urban greenery and maintain its continuity. City managers should use more research and decision-making policy developers to develop targeted policies and scientists should develop planning manuals.

Cities, as places of social interactions and human relationships, face new challenges, problems, and threats, which are sources of stress for residents. An additional cause of stress in recent years has been the COVID-19 pandemic; it was urban dwellers who were most exposed to the virus and most affected by it. Chronic stress has led to the serious erosion of physical health and psychophysical well-being among urban dwellers, and so there is a need to seek new solutions in terms of building the resilience of cities and their residents to stress. This study aims to verify the hypothesis that greenery reduced the level of stress among urban dwellers during the pandemic. The verification of this hypothesis was achieved based on a literature analysis and the results of geo-questionnaire studies conducted involving 651 residents of Poznan—among the largest of Polish cities, where the share of green areas in the spatial structure is more than 30%. According to the analysis, the interviewees experienced above-average stress levels that went up during the pandemic, and the source was not so much the virus but the restrictions imposed. Green areas and outdoor activities helped in reducing this stress (being surrounded by and looking at greenery, garden work, or plant cultivation). Residents perceive a post-pandemic city as one that is more green, in which priority is given to unmanaged green areas. It has also been pointed out that a response to the reported need for urban re-construction towards stress resilience may be a biophilic city.

The extent and continuity of green infrastructure can be adjusted by planning. Depending on the sense of the adjustment, the process can lead to a vicious cycle, resulting in poorer urban quality, or to a virtuous planning, thus leading to psychological wellbeing and sustainability. However, socioeconomic circumstances also play an important role in managing green infrastructure. Starting from these premises, the current study aims to take an in-depth look at the mechanisms of change in urban green infrastructure and provide concrete planning recommendations for dealing with the green infrastructure. It is based on a complex approach, combining an ecological design, including geo-statistical analyses of the structure and dynamics of different categories of green infrastructure in all Romanian and Polish cities covered by the Urban Atlas data during 2006–2018, with selected case studies for analyzing the deeper mechanisms and drivers of change in green infrastructure, and focusing on the role of different planning actors. The results indicate that green infrastructure was lost in all the cities analyzed, regardless of the different planning systems of the two countries. Based on this, specific recommendations can be phrased for all stakeholders of the planning process, including planners, local administrations, policy makers, and scientists.

In the latest conceptions of urban development planning, special attention is paid to the resident. This is reflected especially in the increasingly popular idea of creating ‘a city for people’. This somewhat banal slogan has got an increasingly sensible and justified theoretical support, as well as examples of practical solutions. The idea of planning urban development to meet human needs (a city for people) underlies many conceptions of urban development, especially those the basic goal of which is to limit suburbanisation unfavourable from a general social point of view and to rationalise the mobility of city residents. It has long been known that their mobility reflects the spatial structure of a city, and that their ever more intensive movement is not favourable from the ecological, social and economic points of view. In this situation it is necessary to shape the spatial-functional structure of the city in a way that will, first, restrict this mobility and, secondly, that will change the ways and means by which residents move. However, in order to make changes in the existing spatial structures in a rational way, it is necessary to know the mobility of city dwellers, its causes, directions, distances covered, and duration. What we shall present in this paper are structural and functional conclusions resulting from an analysis of the mobility of residents relevant for planning. Although our reflections will be primarily theoretical in nature, in many cases they will be backed up by empirical studies, mostly concerning Poznań.

The purpose of this study is to present a description of the course of the COVID-19 epidemic in Poland in the space-time dimension in the period from March 15th to August 8th 2020. The result of the conducted research is a presentation of the regional differentiation of the course of the epidemic in Poland, the comparison of the intensity of SARS-CoV-2 infections in particular voivodeships, the determination of the degree of similarity in the course of the pandemic development process in individual regions (voivodeships) of the country, and also the indication of the factors which could be taken into account when attempting to explain the interregional differences in the course of the epidemic. The conducted research shows, among other things, that: (1) in terms of time, the development of the epidemic was generally monotonic, however the increase in new infections was rather cyclical, (2) in the spatial dimension, the development of the epidemic was rather random, although the greatest number of infections was characteristic of the most populated regions of the country, (3) the level of infections in Poland was mainly positively influenced by: population density, working in industry, people beyond retirement, age as well as a poorly developed material base of inpatient care.