Cities are an emanation of societies, therefore to interpret their features and changes can be of great use these theories, that explain the mechanisms of social survival and development; first theories of social change. The support structure for description and explanation of these changes may be the most common social sciences and humanities explanatory diagram of the triad. Her first part is almost complete now “crisis” of the cities. The second link in the triad is the “renewal” of cities in the second half of the XXth century, aiming to reverse the degradation and renew urban economic and social structures. The third member of the triad refers to the present and the next stage symptoms: a renewed and revived thanks to new investments in large cities reborn, strive for the title of “creative” and fill successfully tissue culture and science, aiming to certify that they are still an attractive, living environment. The spatial structure of cities from ancient times reflected social structure. In the postindustrial cities in the form deurbanization affected, resulting in the focus of settlement and economic base moved outside the boundaries of previously developed cities. The current period and the third component of the triad is the era of post‑fordistic “creative cities” with a creative class.

Since Plato and Vitruvius we have seen continuous efforts to strive for the truth, good and beauty focused around a city as a political idea and fundamentally existential space. For ages these efforts have been coupled with thinking of an ideal arrangement and composition of a city, the sense of subjectivity of its dwellers and users, their experiencing of time and space. In particular, in the recent decades, when it was not the space, but the time and its acceleration that became the basic principle of the natural order of things, the role of architecture has been changing. The information technologies made it an act of communication and therefore a part of the message of the media system. They also reversed the direction and thinking of the urban development — from the only one homogenous space‑time continuum to the personalised city based on individualised personalities and respective places in both physical and virtual reality. In the modernist vision of a city the space‑time continua comprising absolute qualities were a priori preferred over thinking of a city as a gathering of various areas, relation networks and flows which unite, merge or split. The times of the advanced communication technologies raise the question concerning the ontological status of a city where independence and individualism in interpersonal contacts together with the identity loss mechanisms symbolised by removing the social relations from the context of the space have become an ideal.

The article presents analysis of changes both in urban space and social consciousness of city dwellers of the Silesian city called Tychy. Authors refer to the empirical studies undertaken in 80’s/90’s of XXth century and in the beginning of second decade of XXIst century. Tychy has been considered as a city without perspectives for the future but after processes of transformation it is now an approachable and attractive urban space.

The article presents a concrete example of suitability of methods of community organizing in the revitalization of the degraded district of the city. The issue of revitalization is among the priorities of territorial and social cohesion policy implemented with the support of European funds in its present a financial perspective European Union. Revitalization is understood as the output of a crisis situation of degraded areas by implementation of comprehensive and integrated social, economic and space programs. It has actually gained solid legal grounds from the accepted recently by the Polish Sejm on Revitalization Law on of 23 July 2015 (Dz.U. 2015, poz. 1777). The aim of the article is to point out how in the revitalization programs to build and use the potential of the local community. The authors are not confined to general guidelines but also refer to the practical experience gathered owing to social projects implemented in Lipiny.

The article aims at analyzing the potential of civic engagement oriented towards improving the quality of life in local communities which unfolds in the course of proceeding with participatory budget in Wrocław. Civic engagement is understood as a manifestation of the rule of inhabitants’ participation, that is their engagement in the process of defining needs, expressing interests and mobilizing resources in local communities in order to meet those needs. Creating the quality of life in local community is defined as an opportunity to satisfy the needs in the public sphere of the city. Despite the weaknesses of the participatory budgets outlined in the article, this procedures have become an interesting lab of civic engagement. For the use of the article, participatory budgets also epitomize the main slogan of the volume „City under construction” since the result of the participatory budgets is the evolution of the spatial form of the city as well as the urban social space, which is made up of intersecting interests of various social groups. The empirical basis for the article is data obtained from Social Diagnosis of Wrocław describing civic engagement of inhabitants. The other source of materials used for secondary data analysis are official documents from the department managing participatory budget on behalf of City Council in Wrocław.

The main problem of the article is the inhabitants’ identification with a city. The theoretical background is based on culturalistic issues of the space value expressed by Florian Znaniecki, and social space and urban identity concepts written by Aleksander Wallis. Moreover, the contemporary theory of identity expressed by Gordon Mathews, Ewa Rewers’ distinction of identity and identification, and David Hummon’s concept of the sense of place are also used. Quantitative research, conducted in Gdańsk, Gliwice, and Wrocław in 2015 serves as an empirical point of reference. The analysis shows a high level of satisfaction out of living in a city and a slightly lower level of identification with a city and its inhabitants. The age of respondents influences the identification with city’s inhabitants — the older ones more often identify themselves with other inhabitants. Regardless of the respondents’ age, contemporary changes which take place in cities as well as in the process of the construction of the individual self, the city is still very important space of identification for its inhabitants.

The economic crisis, which caused the reduction of local governments’ budgets, accelerated the reforms of the territorial organization in many European countries. The said reforms were aimed not only to limit spending and simplify structures, but also to make governments the engine of economic growth. In Polish conditions we rarely talk about reforms of local government in the context of overcoming the results of the crisis. Since the regional reform of 1999, there has been no sign of deeper and braver reform of local government, which is particularly noticeable in the absence of metropolis in the structure of territorial units. The importance of metropolitan areas and their consistent management has been noticed only recently, which is reflected in the Act Amending the Act on Local Government in force since 1 January 2016. A response to the challenges of large urban areas were to be Integrated Territorial Investments (ITI), the realization of which, however, does not seem optimistic as far as the social capital deficit of Polish government elites at concerned. At the moment we can therefore speak about the conditions of metropolization without the metropolis. This state of affairs is unlikely to change quickly by another project of “metropolitan act” that has been prepared and that emerged in the course of the election campaign preceding the general elections at the end of October 2015.

The article aims to present selected problems of the surveys methodology for recognizing the municipal communities opinions. Based on traditions in polish sociology of the study opinion the citizens about live conditions, their expectations and evaluations of municipal authorities author tries to answer the methodological questions: how we should select research attempts, to organize the field research; whether CATI examinations can replace face‑to‑face interviews; why CATI technique are more and more popular; how to balance costs of surveys with the level of errors of measurement? The second part of this paper is introducing reasons of changes in applying the research on the public opinion in Poland as resulting from the evolution of structures and principles of election the self‑government authority. Leaders of cities and communes built new structures and networks for managing the living conditions of residents. Their staff management and institutional procedures are under pressure by departments of the state and the strong interest groups too. The public opinion is undergoing profiling residents to social groups via NGO associations. They are becoming as one of any interest groups which adopting to the role of consultants and representations of the residents. It is limiting the role of the wide research on the public opinion. At present times local surveys of the residents opinions are losing information and consultative functions (more authentic are the municipal new movements). The surveys are increasingly a form of the ritual communication with the communities and supporting purely formally the status and the decision of units of the citizen authority.

In the beginning of the 21st century, the issue of discrimination became a subject of public policy. Based on two different logics: repressive and preventive, equal treatment policy was to become one of the primary tools in the realisation of the ideal of “actual” equality and social justice. Nonetheless, despite mobilising state institutions and the efforts of other organisations, implementation of the non-discrimination policies remains fraught with difficulties. To transform the letter of the law into real-world change constitutes a significant problem for French local governments. Likewise, social sciences encounter similar difficulties, particularly from the methodological and epistemic points of view; the city of Grenoble can serve as one of such case studies. The article discusses the research results of studies conducted by sociologists and political scientists from the Grenoble Alpes University. The main research topic was the complexity of the phenomenon and experience of discrimination as well as the functioning of the Urban Policy, which is perceived in France as a political answer to the issue of growing social and economic inequalities in the so-called difficult neighbourhoods. The example of Grenoble contributes a lot of findings which can serve as a basis of general reflection on the coherence and effectiveness of the implemented policies as well as their actual influence on leveling the inequalities among the inhabitants of urban spaces.

The purpose of the article is to present changes in the approach to reform of local government in the United Kingdom, in the case of which, since 1997, so after the seizure of power by the Labour Party, the strengthening of the position of individual regions of the United Kingdom, id est Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland can be observed. Paradoxically devolution did not take place in England which does not have its own government and parliament. The response of the conservative‑liberal democrat coalition to this situation is without doubt the proposal to strengthen the competencies and powers of English cities. Such a policy is without doubt an example of a broader change in the contemporary political discourse, which recognizes an increasingly important role played not only, but still, by regions, but also by cities. The aim of the article is to familiarize a reader with these changes on the example of the UK, where the global tendencies to strengthen the role of cities, of which examples are such initiatives as the United Cities and Local Governments, International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives and C40 become to have real, institutional, inscribed in a particular political and national tradition shapes.

Using as a pretext design proposals for University of Silesia’s campus urban development, made by the students of the second year Master of Architecture programme at the University of Plymouth in the academic year 2014—10151, the chapter explores the possibilities and conditions of existence of special urban territories, excluded from the logic of short-term profit. These types of territories exist / could exist based on different value systems, and the purpose of their existence and development should be defined based on logics going beyond the financial gain of individual or collective actors. The chapter focuses on the possibilities of the occurrence of urban spaces enabling social experiments, allowing testing post-capitalist future in a context of contemporary Polish university campus.