More development

Taking off from Okecie yesterday morning, I snapped this brand new development of 131 houses, which will be joined by a further 470. The entire 60 hectare site, when developed, will deliver around several hundred cars a day onto the Aleja Krakowska, heading towards Janki 7km away (monstrous jams already!) and into town.

Below: How the site looks today on Google Earth. I wonder how long it will take before the Walendia development appears here.

It appears that the houses here will start at 1.5m zlotys - that's around 350,000 quid. Given that we're 21km (13 miles) from the centre of Warsaw, we're almost talking London money. If you can read Polish, this discussion on Gazeta.pl's real estate forum on the subject of the Walendia estate is very educational.

It's worrying that developments like Walendia are springing up all over outlying municipalities, beyond Warsaw's administrative borders, with no central planning body in place to oversee the growth of the agglomeration.

The current government has plans to create a number of agglomerations to supervise the outward development of Poland's larger cities - this is a move in the right direction. A body administering Warsaw's growth needs to start with good data and forget the oft-used figure of "1.8 million" for the city's population. It's 2.7 million (900,000 residents are not registered or zameldowani). It's a similar story for all the gminy (municipalities) and powiaty (districts) on Warsaw's periphery. The planned Obszar Metropolitalny Warszawy will take in 17 districts/60 municipalities beyond Warsaw's border. This does make sense, but Poland's propensity to grow its administrative sector beyond what's reasonable is a worry.

This time last year:
Poppies in bloom