Editorial

The 100th anniversary of the Polish Geographical Society is an important historic event on the development path of geography in Poland. Through the efforts of the Committee for Geographical Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Polish Geographical Society, 2018 has been announced the Year of Polish Geography. It is a great opportunity to review the development directions of geography and its cognitive and practical functions. Over the last hundred years, changes in Polish geography have reflected the global tendencies in geographical sciences and evolved from descriptive and regional approaches through quantitative and systemic ones, up to the development of modern, digital geoinformation platforms. Geography, due to its dual character of natural and social sciences, provides data and information, and formulates regularities in terms of physical and environmental as well as socio-economic and political changes in the geographic space. The output of Polish geographers includes first of all the domestic issues, but also participation in many European and global programmes and research projects, including scientific expeditions to various parts of the world. Polish geographers successfully contribute to current global trends in geographical research.

In the 100-year-old history of the development of Polish geography an important role has been played by the Poznań geographical centre and the nation- and worldwide journal Quaestiones Geographicae. The journal was established in 1974 as an annual of the then Institute of Geography, Adam Mickiewicz University (AMU). It was one of the few Polish journals issued in English at the time. Its founder and first editor was Professor Stefan Kozarski. At present the journal is published quarterly by the Faculty of Geographical and Geological Sciences of Adam Mickiewicz University, which is the largest geographical faculty in Poland. The scope of the journal covers issues of both physical and socio-economic geography in many research fields, including also environmental science, spatial management and planning, GIS and geoinformation, regional studies, tourism and recreation. The primary mission of Quaestiones Geographicae is to assist researchers in promoting their achievements in the worldwide scientific community. The journal Quaestiones Geographicae opens up the possibility of presenting achievements of geographers not only from Poland, but also from the entire world.

For over 40 years the journal has become increasingly important on the international market of geographical journals which has been manifested by a significant increase in citations after 2010 (Fig. 1). Our quarterly is published not only in the traditional version, but also on the digital platform of de Gruyter, and indexed in the bibliographic data bases such as: AGRO, CABI, Clarivate Analytics – Emerging Sources Citation Index, Clarivate Analytics – Web of Science, Current Geographical Publications, DOAJ, EBSCO, Elsevier – SCOPUS, ERIH PLUS, GeoRef, Google Scholar, Index Copernicus, Microsoft Academic, POL-index, Publons, SCImago, WorldCat.

Fig. 1

All the activities undertaken by the Editorial Board and Editorial Advisory Board aim to make the journal increasingly international in scope, in spite of growing competition. In the eyes of the readers the journal is distinct in terms of its well-designed layout and short term of publication. Contributions with a deep theoretical and methodological background in geosciences, overviews and comparative studies representing different geographical areas are highly preferred.

In theme issues, published from time to time, Quaestiones Geographicae presented such topical questions as the role of cultural and creative industries in the development policies of cities and regions, new challenges in local, metropolitan and regional governance, spatial mathematics in its geographical context, contemporary agricultural development in Europe or urban geosites in selected European cities.

This “occasional” volume of Quaestiones Geographicae is devoted to other different topical geographical questions. We wish to demonstrate selected issues that Polish human geographers dealt with in the period prior to the 100th jubilee of Polish geography. They also involve the research carried out in the international cooperation.

The volume opens with two articles devoted to general geographical questions and terminological discussions related to the concept of city resilience (L. Mierzejewska, M. Wdowicka) as well as to modern services and their role in socio-economic development (J. Dominiak). In the next article T. Michalski makes an attempt to characterise main research directions in Polish medical geography which is becoming a very promising geographical sub-discipline.

Three successive articles show a wide international scope of Polish geographical research. M. Czerny deals with the issue of re-shared urban space seen from the perspective of different actors and processes in South American cities. The article by M. Pacuk, T. Palmowski and M. Tarkowski offers an overview of the Polish input to research on Baltic Europe. In turn, the article written by an international team of authors (I. Rodionova, T. Krejdenko, C. Mądry) takes us to the Russian Federation and identifies the specificity of a cluster policy in this country. Another international team (W. Dyba, B. Loewen, J. Looga and P. Zdražil) analyses regional development in East-Central Europe in the 21st century in a comparative perspective, from the point of view of path dependence and the impact of the EU Cohesion Policy.

Regional development issues related to the national spatial scale are continued in the subsequent article by P. Churski. Here, the subject of analysis is the role of regional contracts as a tool of the regional policy in Poland. Development questions (both urban and rural) are also touched upon in the articles by P. Ciesiółka (“Urban regeneration as a new trend in the development policy in Poland”), J. Biegańska, S. Środa-Murawska, Z. Kruzmetra and F. Swiaczny (“Peri-urban development as a significant rural development trend”) as well as Robert and Natalia Hoffmann (“The LEADER programme as an impulse for new projects in rural areas”). These articles show that EU membership exerts great influence on the trends in geographical research in East-Central European countries (including Poland). Undoubtedly, European integration is something that geographers living 100 years ago could have only dreamt about.

We hope that this special publication of Quaestiones Geographicae will contribute to the celebration of the 100th anniversary of Polish geography continuing its most glorious tradition.