Inwestycje budowlane na gruntach rolnych położonych w granicach administracyjnych miast

Abstract

Pursuant to the new article 5b of the Act on the protection of agricultural and afforested lands as amended on 19 December 2008 agricultural lands situated within the administrative borders of cities has been excluded from the scope of this Act. As a consequence, changing conditions of development of such agricultural lands is now subject to the planning and development Act only. Legislator settled the conflict of two values deciding that the need of protection of agricultural lands should not hinder the urbanization processes within the city limits. The article discusses regulatory environment created as a result of the mentioned amendment of the Act, presenting in particular potential threats that due to the actual lack of master plans and inefficient regulations promoting enactment thereof, large areas of undeveloped agricultural lands located within the city limits will be developed in accordance with individual planning permits, where the current planning and development Act does not provide for the precise criteria for issuing such planning permits in undeveloped areas that used to be a farmlands. So–called good neighborhood rule, which assumes continuation and duplication of already existing solutions seems to be inadequate tool to the needs of urbanization of undeveloped areas, to which agricultural lands are very often counted. The author expresses opinion that the issue of providing sufficient amount of investment areas for the city development purposes has much broader dimension and may not be limited to formal status conversion. Effective transformation of agricultural production areas into investment areas requires enactment of the local master plans determining not only possibilities of non–agricultural development of particular plots but also indicating scope and basic rules for required mergers and/or divisions of land necessary for it’s development, and regulating principles of development of technical and communication infrastructure (e.g. road system), drainage, environmental protection and other issues, which cannot be effectively addressed on the individual decisions level. The permanent solution of this problem would require deeper system changes particularly in development planning regulations.