Land consolidation in the context of linear infrastructure projects: Adverse outcomes from southern Poland

摘要

Land fragmentation and the resulting constraints on farm management represent a persistent challenge in many rural areas of Poland and Europe. The aim of this paper is to critically examine the effectiveness of land consolidation projects implemented in connection with the construction of the A4 motorway in southern Poland. The analysis covers selected areas where consolidation processes were restricted exclusively to parts of villages located directly adjacent to the linear infrastructure. The assessment was based on classical fragmentation and parcel shape indices as well as basic agrarian structure parameters. The findings clearly indicate that such a narrowly defined scope of interventions yields unsatisfactory outcomes: improvements in land structure are minor, while problems of fragmentation remain essentially unresolved at the village scale. This suggests that the current institutional model, which reduces land consolidation to a compensatory measure limited to motorway surroundings, does not adequately address the real needs of rural areas.