Kraków (Poland)

Kraków, Poland’s second-largest city, is a major administrative, economic and cultural centre with around 820,000 residents and a much larger daily population of users, visitors and temporary residents. Its urban structure combines a dense historic core, a UNESCO-listed heritage area and highly used public spaces, making climate resilience a particularly complex challenge.

Kraków is especially relevant to JUST4CARE because water-related risks play a central role in its vulnerability profile. Floods, intense rainfall and sudden runoff in sealed urban catchments pose a serious threat to infrastructure, mobility and safety, with dynamics that strongly echo those faced by Ankara. These challenges are made more complex by the city’s topography, the high density of heritage buildings and the presence of large numbers of tourists and temporary users in the centre.

Kraków’s connection to JUST4CARE is grounded in a vision of adaptation that combines technical innovation with social justice. The city is interested in approaches that protect vulnerable groups, improve preparedness and ensure that adaptation is not treated only as an infrastructure issue, but also as a question of health, equity and access.

In particular, Kraków is looking to learn from the project in order to improve early warning systems, test safe evacuation and “dry corridor” approaches, and strengthen the use of spatial and historical data to guide more just and effective responses to climate-related risk.

Detailed information:

Kraków serves as the capital of the Lesser Poland Voivodeship. It is a key administrative and economic hub. The city covers an area of 327 km² in the upper Vistula river basin. It features diverse terrain – from river valleys to elevations reaching 310 m above sea level. Kraków has a specific user structure: although around 820,000 people are registered residents, the actual number of urban infrastructure users reaches 1.0–1.1 million. The city’s historic core, including the Old Town, Wawel Castle, Kazimierz, and Stradom layouts, is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This area is characterized not only by a high concentration of historic buildings but also by very high tourist traffic, particularly tourists, students, and temporary visitors.

In practice, this means that the daily number of people in the center significantly exceeds the number of permanent residents, which substantially complicates informational and evacuation actions in sudden threat situations, such as intense rainfall or flash floods. According to the latest 2024 data, Kraków was visited by 14.7 million tourists, over 85% of whom were short-stay visitors.

 Specific Vulnerability Challenges

In Kraków’s natural threat structure, water-related phenomena dominate. Floods pose the most serious threat both in terms of potential material losses and disruptions to city functioning. In planning documents, Kraków has been classified as a special flood risk area, with these threats described, among others, by types A11 (river floods associated with a large river – the Vistula) and A21 (rainfall floods in urbanized areas).

Kraków shows significant similarities to the pilot city of Ankara in terms of hydrological threat specifics, making it an ideal candidate for replicating solutions:

• Flash flood character: like Ankara, Kraków struggles with sudden rainfall floods resulting from intense downpours (on average 5–6 times a year). In both cities, the short concentration time of runoff in urbanized catchments leads to infrastructure paralysis within just a dozen minutes.
• Terrain sealing impact: both cities have a high degree of surface sealing. In Kraków, biologically active areas in many zones do not exceed 20–30%. This causes rains that were once absorbed by the ground to turn into dangerous surface runoff.
• Terrain shape: both Kraków and Ankara have diverse topography with areas of significant slope. This promotes accumulation of rainwater in the lowest catchment points, creating threats to underground passages, tunnels, and properties in terrain depressions.
• UNESCO center threat: Kraków has an additional challenge in the form of its historic core (Old Town, Kazimierz) with heritage buildings and high tourist density, complicating rapid evacuation during sudden surges.

Alignment with JUST4CARE

Kraków is developing a vision that combines innovative infrastructure management with care for the most vulnerable groups, fitting the JUST4CARE project goals. The city implements modern computational standards (e.g., the “Kraków method”), which enforce 90-95% rainwater retention, directly protecting low-lying areas inhabited by lower economic status individuals. At the same time, the city addresses inequalities in climate resilience, focusing on the elderly and ill in districts with little shade. Through participatory design of solutions, Kraków ensures that climate adaptation is not just a technical challenge but a socially just process, protecting the mobility and health of all residents.

Replication Objective

As a replication city, Kraków aims to transfer experiences from pilot cities to the local context to:- Optimize early warning systems, exemplified by integrating city monitoring (e.g., on Seraf, Drwinka, Dłubnia streams) with crisis management procedures for faster network overload identification.

• Optimize early warning systems, exemplified by integrating city monitoring (e.g., on Seraf, Drwinka, Dłubnia streams) with crisis management procedures for faster network overload identification.
• Validate “dry corridors” by testing the effectiveness of safe evacuation routes from the threatened center to main transport hubs.
• Replication will be based on multi-year spatial GIS data (PSP intervention locations from 2021–2025) and historical flood report analyses (including 2010 and 2019).