Residents’ bond with the city and its influence on the evaluation of changes taking place in the city

This article presents the results of a study carried out as part of the project ‘City Observatory – a platform for cooperation between the academic community and the surrounding area’, in six cities of three voivodeships of Eastern Poland – Białystok, Lublin, Rzeszów, Suwałki, Biała Podlaska and Krosno. The three capitals of the Podlaskie, Lubelskie and Podkarpackie Voivodeships and three cities from these voivodeships, which lost the status of voivodeship cities as a result of the administrative reform of 1999, were selected for the study. The study involved 11,397 respondents, from three groups of respondents: parents/guardians of primary and lower secondary school pupils, secondary school pupils and students. The main aim of the article is to determine the level of residents’ bond with the city in retrospect, based on a set of statements (items) built on a five-point Likert scale, and to identify variables that differentiate the respondents’ bond with the city in a statistically significant way. The research showed that the strength of residents’ bond with the city influences their assessment of the quality of life in the city and the changes taking place in it. The level of residents’ bond with the city is influenced by the gender of the respondents, membership of the research group – parents, students, pupils and the fact of being a city resident or city user.

The attitudes toward cities based on the results of survey research in six cities in Eastern Poland

In the article, the intensity of attitudes toward cities and their correlates was analyzed based on research conducted in six cities in Eastern Poland (the capitals of three voivodeships: Rzeszów, Białystok, and Lublin, as well as three cities that lost their voivodeship capital status due to administrative reforms implemented in 1999: Biała Podlaska, Krosno, and Suwałki). The study involved 11,397 surveys completed by parents/guardians of primary and secondary school students, secondary school students, and university students. The analyses were carried out by creating a synthetic measure of attitudes toward the city. The analysis of intensity levels allowed us to capture positive, negative, and neutral attitudes. Based on the rich empirical material collected, statistically significant differences were observed concerning variables such as gender, reference city, residence within or outside the reference city, respondent category, knowledge level about the reference city, trust in other people, belief that the given city is a good place to live for the respondent, and perception of the city by others.

The image of the city in the minds of young users of Rzeszów’s space

In the era of increased competition between cities, building a positive image of the city is becoming an important element of marketing strategies. The image of a city includes all subjective ideas of reality that are formed in people’s minds as a result of perception, the influence of mass media and informal information messages. The image of a city includes both physical and emotional elements. Physical elements are objective characteristics of a place, such as its size, location, spatial structure, condition of infrastructure and type of development. Emotional elements include people’s emotional attitude and sympathy towards a given place. Therefore, all promotional activities undertaken by the authorities and changes in the city space may affect these image elements. Some changes may have a positive impact while others may have a negative impact on one’s image. The aim of the article is to present the results of a study on the image of Rzeszów. The study was conducted in spring 2022 on a sample of 415 students of the University of Rzeszów. The CAWI technique was used to collect data. These are not the first analyzes of the city image phenomenon. Previous publications show that the subjective image of the city in the minds of its inhabitants is positive. Residents point out to many good changes that have taken place in urban space in recent years. The most important ones included increasing the city’s aesthetics, improving the quality of streets and expanding the city to include surrounding towns. Unlike previous studies, which were mainly devoted to measuring hard and soft quality of life indicators, this time the focus was on assessing the specificity and originality of Rzeszów in the minds of the respondents.