Socio-economic development is the widest term encompassing a general development tendency of a country, region or territorial unit. The paper undertakes to calculate the level of development of rural and urban-rural communes in the Malopolska province using a method of so called zero unitarization. Ten diagnostic features, homogenous for all communes characterizing economy and local communities were selected. As has been demonstrated by the computations results, disproportions in the development of socio-economic development in the Malopolska province are considerable, particularly concerning the economic development. It has been cor-roborated by the well known opinion about poorly developed eastern part of the province and economically stronger western part. Social development is more ter-ritorially diversified, however the scale of the diversification is much lower. In conclusion the Author referred to research conducted by other authors, testifying the processes of spatial polarization, i.e. growing development differences between the rich or getting rich areas and poor ones. Rich areas develop owing to utilization of their potential and good market condition, whereas poverty areas (also called problem areas) for various reasons remain economically stagnant.
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Spatial planning in Poland undergoes constant changes due to the activity of the legislative body. These changes to a varying extent affect the activity of local authorities of rural gminas in the scope of spatial planning. The diversity in rural gminas is especially noticed in the application of land-use plans, and consequently also the planning permissions. Similarly, this diversity concerns changing the status of farmland from agricultural to residential and deforestation of agricultural and forest land. These factors are the elements forming the level of spatial planning culture that results from the regulations forming the spatial planning system. The equivalent element that forms the spatial planning culture is use of tools available by law, taking into consideration their gradation due to their complexity. These assumptions allowed for using the Central Statistical Office's resources to form indexes related to the area of spatial planning. These indexes became the component parts involved in the construction of Hellwig's synthetic measures of development. By using synthetic measures, it was possible to form the classification of rural gminas in the central region of Poland due to their level of spatial planning culture.The obtained results allowed for the evaluation of the level of spatial planning culture ...
