GREEN AREAS IN STRATEGIES FOR CONTROLLING CITY STRUCTURE

Since the 1980's, and in Poland two decades later, cities have been subjected to a continuous and dynamic transformation. The city spaces have become places of global capital flow acceleration, and in the market-based economy they have been turned into a commodity. This situation has led to the feeling of powerlessness and lack of any visions for cities that would reach far into the future. With the impetuous and uncontrolled development of cities - growth combined with increased density, and shrinking and disappearance at the other end of the spectrum - the current planning methods have become insufficient. Despite appearances of development, Wroclaw is a shrinking, peripheral city. Owing to the war damages, the post-war clearing-up demolition, economic weakness in the socialist economic system, and above all short-term, opportunistic and incoherent urban planning over the last 25 years, the city structure is split, fragmented and composed of several independent elements. On the two-dimensional plane, its organisation and operation is provided by the city transport system. However, its compositional layout and form are uncontrolled. The largest, and perhaps the only field of intervention into the city structure remain areas that belong to cities, such as streets, squares, pedestrian precincts, transport arteries, lines of rivers and areas of city wastelands, which owing to their range have the integrating / merging potential. In this text I probe into the possibilities of using green areas as "soft" elements for controlling the structure, for supra-local systems both at the level of the whole city and at the level of city districts and areas. In my proposals for strategies I treat Wroclaw as a case study, whereas the strategies themselves do not intend to create any exhausting visions, but rather to show a new urban planning paradigm for city development.