A new report by the Urban Land Institute documents how Poland – Europe’s most dynamic economy over the past two decades – has developed some of the continent’s most compelling urban destinations. The country’s cities look nothing like the image many foreign investors still carry in their heads.
Most of the world still pictures Poland through one of two lenses: the rubble of the Second World War, or the grey stillness of the communist era. Both images are decades out of date. Since joining the European Union in 2004, Poland has delivered the highest cumulative economic growth of any OECD country – outperforming Ireland, South Korea, and every G7 nation. Unemployment has fallen from over 20% in the early 2000s to the lowest rate in the EU. Six Polish cities rank among Europe’s 15 fastest-growing urban economies over the same period. Poland is no longer catching up. In many respects, it has overtaken.
That transformation is now written into the cities themselves. Across Warsaw, Łódź, Poznań, Gdańsk, Gdynia, and Wrocław, former factories, breweries, shipyards, and post-industrial sites have been remade into some of the most layered, publicly accessible mixed-use destinations in Europe – places where people live, work, eat, and spend time within a single urban structure that has preserved the bones of what came before. New Urban Poland, a report published by the Urban Land Institute, documents this shift for the first time — drawing on 14 case studies across six cities and 25 years of urban transformation.
“Urban destinations are no longer a niche experiment in Poland – they are a proven concept, and a core part of how cities grow and how capital is deployed. This report captures fourteen projects that prove the model works, and works at scale,” says Maximilian Mendel, ULI Poland member, managing partner at Sphere Asset Management, lead editor and co-author of the report.
In Łódź, a 25-hectare textile factory that once employed thousands now draws millions of visitors a year as one of Central Europe’s most visited destinations – while retaining its original brick halls, factory chimneys, and industrial courtyards. In Gdańsk, a new mixed-use district is rising on the former shipyard where the Solidarność movement was born. These cases are part of a pattern.
The projects profiled in the report share a common logic. All are built on heritage – none are greenfield developments. Each combines multiple uses: housing, offices, food and drink, culture, retail, and public space, within a single open structure integrated into the surrounding city. The mix is not decorative. Offices generate daytime activity; residential anchors a permanent population; cultural programming extends the life of a place beyond business hours. These are fully fledged pieces of cities, not standalone real estate schemes.
“For years, Polish cities were described mainly through the lens of rapid growth and catching up. This report shows something more: the maturing of a distinct urban development model in which private projects increasingly create fully fledged parts of the city, rather than just standalone investments,” says Marcin Juszczyk, chairman of ULI Poland.
What gives these places their character is harder to replicate than their formula. Brick façades, factory chimneys, industrial halls, and cobbled yards provide a level of spatial depth and narrative identity that new-build developments rarely achieve. In the strongest projects, that heritage is not preserved as a museum piece – it is actively inhabited by cultural venues, restaurants, markets, and residents who choose to be there.
“The strength of Polish urban destinations lies not only in their mix of uses, but also in the cultural layer that gives these places character, memory and recognisability. In Polish projects, it is very often heritage, cultural programming and the ability to build an experience around a place that make an investment part of the city, rather than just an address on the map,” says Kuba Snopek, member of the Urban Destinations Product Council at ULI Poland, managing partner at Direction, co-editor and co-author of the report.
The report’s broader argument is that Poland is no longer simply importing urban development ideas from Western Europe. It has developed its own format — recognisable, proven, and now spreading across multiple cities of different scales and characters. That format, the report suggests, has something to offer the international real estate and urban development community at large.
“From a European perspective, Poland has become one of the most interesting laboratories of urban transformation. The report shows that urban destinations developed in Polish cities combine heritage, mixed-use and long-term thinking about the city in a way that deserves the attention of the international real estate community,” says Simon Chinn, ULI Europe, Research & Advisory Services.
