Driver Factors, Wildcards and Spatial External Effects of Urban Sprawl in Poland

The recent years were rich in new and unexpected social and political factors for Poland, such as the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020-2021 and the refugee crisis in 2021-2022. These ‘wildcards’ will definitely have serious consequences for people and cities, directly and through the impact of so-called externalities. The paper identifies trends in the geographical development of urban areas in Poland during the last five years (2016-2021), particularly in terms of residential suburbanization and urban sprawl. The study aims to explore the driver factors that determine the spatial scale of suburbanization and reveal ‘wildcards’ that may indirectly affect this process but are hard to be quantified and embedded into spatial analysis. Both wildcards and externalities of suburbanization seem to be underexplored, and this paper’s goal is to bring progress on this pass. The spatial analysis applying location quotients (LQ) metrics creates the possibility for comparisons of locations with intensified urbanization for different time moments, thus fulfilling a function similar to the standardization of features considering time and space perspectives. The results makes the evidence to progressive suburbanization around the main Polish cities during the years 2016-2021, revealing, at the same time, distinguishing features of spatial development for the period associated with social and political stresses (2021).