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Poland Population Density and Distribution
The most important change in postwar Poland's
population
distribution was the intense urbanization that took place
during
the first two decades of communist rule. The priorities of
central economic planning undoubtedly hastened this
movement, but
experts hypothesize that it would have occurred after
World War
II in any case
(see Establishing the Planning Formula
, ch.
3). In
1931 some 72.6 percent of the population was classified as
rural,
with nearly 60 percent relying directly on agriculture for
their
livelihood. By 1978 those figures had diminished to 42.5
and 22.5
percent, respectively. In the next ten years, the share of
rural
population dropped by only 3.7 percent, however,
indicating that
the proportions had stabilized.
In 1989 Poland had twenty-four cities with populations
of at
least 150,000 people. Major urban centers are distributed
rather
evenly through the country; the most concentrated urban
region is
the cluster of industrial settlements in Katowice District
(see
fig. 13, Appendix). In 1990 overall population density was
121
people per square kilometer, up from 115 per square
kilometer in
1981. The most densely populated places are the cities of
ód
(over 3,000 people per square kilometer) and Warsaw (about
2,000
people per square kilometer). Urban areas, which contain
over 60
percent of Poland's population, occupy about 6 percent of
the
country's total area. In 1990 average population density
in rural
areas was fifty-one people per square kilometer, a small
increase
over the 1950 figure of forty-seven people per square
kilometer.
Data as of October 1992
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