Geographia Polonica (1988) vol. 54
Migrations among Polish urban agglomerations
Geographia Polonica (1988) vol. 54, pp. 101-108 | 
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Abstract
It is widely accepted in the literature that urban agglomerations play an important part in the national settlement system. The question, however, arises whether they shoud be considered in terms of a common sub-system within the national settlement system or as comprised within their individual regional settlement systems. Beginning with the morphology of the agglomerations, especially from their observed sectoral develpoment, as following bands of the transportation and communication infrastruc-ture, it was concluded that the development was related to the placement of neighbouring agglomerations. On this basis the conclusion was arrived at that the agglomerations must be strongly interrelated. Further on, a hypothesis was put forward that agglomerations form an integrated sub-system within the national settlement system (Korcelli 1976). A test of whether or not urban agglomerations should be considered in terms of common sub-system ought, however, to be supported by an investigation of whether their inter-relationships are more important than the relation-ships ot each of them with its umiand. The answer to this question would allow us to conclude whether changes in the Polish settlement system aim at the develpoment of a single super-agglomeration, as Leszczycki (1973) maintains, or of a system of urban regions with agglomerations as the centres of some of them, as Dziewoński (1972, 1973) agrues. An analysis of the Polish regional structure indicated that agglomerations are entities of a regional rather than national scale; this permitted the hypothesis that the relationships between individual agglomerations and their regions are stronger thar those between the agglomerations are (Rykiel 1978). To test this hypothesis, vectoral data should be used which would allow the distinguishing of the relationships within the hypothetic sub-system of agglomerations, those between individual agglomerations and their respective regions, and those with the rest of Poland.
, Institute of Geography and Spatial Organization Polish Academy of Sciences, Krakowskie Przedmieście 30, 00-927 Warszawa, Poland