This presentation investigates the reasons for the back-to-the-city movement, as they pertain to suburban quality of life, and the ensuing potential for socio-spatial transformations of suburban areas. This qualitative study, which employs a qualitative method based on a two-pillar conceptual framework, focuses on returnees from suburbia to six major cities in Poland. The first pillar is reurbanization in its residential aspect, particularly the process of re-emigration from suburban areas to the central city. (Glatter, Siedhoff 2008; Ourednicek 2015). The second pillar is a life-course view on the return to the city, emphasising its temporal, multi-scalar, and social dynamics as they unfold over a lifetime (Bernardi et al. 2019). (Elder et al. 2003; Falkingram et al. 2020; Mulder&Hooimeijer 1999, Coulter&van Ham 2013). Some quantitative and qualitative study on selective in-migration in Polish and Czech cities has already been conducted. (Haase et al. 2012). However, as an example of an ECE country, return mobility from suburbs to inner-cities in Poland remains an unstudied occurrence. Thematic coding was used to uncover connections between psychological dispositions, life domain performance, societal subsystems, and the experience of fleeing the suburbs for the city in the study’s empirical material, which consisted of 46 semi-structured interviews. _x000D_
The presentation shows how complex features of suburban liveability in Poland (determined by macro-processes such as spatial planning and housing policies, as well as mezzo-level contexts such as pollution, transportation, and public service availability) contribute to housing stress, create potential for future small-scale change in the suburbs, and gives visibility to residential actors, such as: urbanites by choice (Buzar et al. 2007), urbanites by necessity, transitory urbanites (Haase et al. 2012), temporary suburbanites (Kopecna, Spackova 2012).

Katarzyna Kajdanek
University of Wrocław, Institute of Sociology

 
ID Abstract: 292