GREEN AREAS IN STRATEGIES OF BUILDING LOCAL CONNECTIONS

Today, the dimension of a city is defined by networking relationships. These, however, are not covered in the hierarchically-oriented planning of Wroclaw. Spontaneous processes that affect the city, such as growth, densification as well as its shrinkage and disappearance, reveal inefficiency of the applied planning methods which have led to its disintegration into numerous small, separated fragments. Regardless of planning shortcomings, which concern the whole city, today Wroclaw struggles with decentralization of the compact historical European city and a new form of "in between-city" type of urbanity instead, which poses a challenge related to planning and designing the urban landscape. Areas owned by the city remain the biggest and perhaps the only field of interference with the city. They include streets, squares, pedestrian areas, thoroughfares, belts rivers, urban wasteland areas which, owing to their extent, have the potential to merge the city structure in terms of its composition and above all its function. This text is the second part of my research on green areas acting as "soft elements" that control the city structure. The first one focused on examining connections across the city. In order to present the full picture, the analysis included also links existing on a local scale. This paper investigates three selected areas of Wroclaw freaturing diverse urban morphologies. Each case was considered with a view to find possibilities for converting empty, neglected lots into green areas. The primary goal was to test different strategies where green areas could be used to build connections for walking and cycling within the urban fabric.