The Urban and the Rural: Similarities and Differences in Poland after 15 Years of Transformation (1988-2005)

摘要

Underlying the urban-rural dichotomy is a polarisation of socio-economic development, or marked differences in economic functions, level of technical and social infrastructure, accessibility of services, and lifestyles; in other words, in the standards of living of the inhabitants of towns and the countryside. Agglomeration advantages of towns, especially big cities, their nodal position in transport systems, concentration of functions, diversity, and a high degree of centrality have turned them into cores while leaving rural areas as peripheries. This core-periphery division has been stressed in many theories of socio-economic development. A comparison was made of selected indices of socio- economic development in an urban-rural approach for two time periods. Its purpose was to find if the urban-rural differences had a tendency to persist. Worth noting is the observation that the general direction of socio-economic change is similar in both the city and the countryside. However, the rate of change is different. The distance between the two tends to narrow in those fields where rural backwardness was the greatest: demographic change, education, accessibility of shopping, and especially public utilities. The disparity tends to widen in the fields of economic activity and access to many services, especially public.