Typology of towns in the peripheries of Polish coastal regions: conclusions for urban policy

Peripheries means the land outside metropolitan areas. One of the main problems in these areas is a lack of growth factors. Some towns can contribute to the development of these regions, because there are few such factors, and it is easier to create the new ones, especially in urban policy. The subject of this paper is a typology of towns within the Polish peripheral coastal regions, limited to towns with more than 5 thousand inhabitants. Its purpose is to recognize diverse role of towns in the regional development, and to create the basis for the formulation of urban and regional policy. Typology takes into account the state of economic development, the external functions of towns, their impact, as well as present and future transport accessibility. Two kinds of systematization were applied: 1) quantitative typology applying Principal Components Analysis (PCA) and the cluster analysis using the k-means algorithm, 2) qualitative classifications. Then synthetic typology was done. As a result of the typology, there were identified important towns for the future development of peripheral areas and formulated the conclusions for regional planning and urban policy.