Geographia Polonica (1975) vol. 32
Research for physical planning in Poland 1944-1974
Geographia Polonica (1975) vol. 32, pp. 5-22 | 
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Abstract
The organization of research for physical planning in Poland has had a long tradition reaching back to the inter-war period of later twenties. However, its full development has taken place only after the war. In the last thirty years in Poland such applied research has played an important role in the progress of physical planning on all three basic, i.e.: national, regional and local levels, as well as in the development of various sciences, in particular: of geography. Nevertheless, the subject and the scope of such research were constantly chang-ing. Such changes were connected on one hand with the arising needs of plan-ning and planners, and on the other with readiness and possibilities of undertak-ing the proposed themes by scientific institutions and scientists. Their effec-tiveness was always rather closely connected with organizational forms prevail-ing at the given moment and current methodology of scientific research plan-ning. For these reasons a more detailed description of research carried out in these years, its character and achievements to be presented here should be di-vided into several parts, each connected with successive stages in organizational transformations of physical planning and scientific research. The following pha-ses shall be taken into account: years 1944-1953, the time when the integrated institutions of physical planning were organized, and when their relations to the institutions of economic planning were defined and developed, and when the research institutions at the universities were being reestablished after war de-struction; years 1954-1958, when the national and regional planning was inclu-ded in the long-term or "perspective" economic planning and the central re-search institutes of the Polish Academy of Sciences were founded; years 1959-1970, when the long-term research was organized and coordinated by the Com-mittee for Space Economy and Regional Planning of the Polish Academy of Sciences; and, finally years since 1971 when the first draft of the national plan for physical development till 1990 was being prepared and most of the research studies were concentrated within the framework of a very ambitious programme of the so-called "nodal" problem: scientific bases for the physical development of the country. To introduce the whole process a short information en the re-search carried out earlier, in the thirties, i.e., before the Second World War is given. Without this information the post-war situation cannot be understood fully.
, Instytut Geografii i Przestrzennego Zagospodarowania PAN ul. Krakowskie Przedmieście 30, 00-927 Warszawa