Metropolitan Areas in Poland - State of Development and its Barriers

Metropolitan areas are increasingly often regarded as the key drivers of economic growth and the main targets of social and economic development strategies. Those processes are fraught with numerous limitations and barriers. The aim of this study was to identify major problems in the development of Polish metropolitan areas. The key issues were characterized based on a review of the available literature. Attempts were made to propose general solutions to selected problems. In Poland, the identification of metropolitan areas poses a problem, which lowers the effectiveness of management strategies for those regions. Polish urban agglomerations have weakly developed metropolitan functions, which compromises their status in European rankings and European metropolitan area networks.