The Urban Planning Register: where Polish planning goes digital
Until recently, checking a parcel's planning status meant hunting resolutions across municipal websites and scanned drawings in assorted scales. The 2023 reform replaces that with one central, public, free collection: the Urban Planning Register (Rejestr Urbanistyczny).
What the register is
It is a centrally run IT system in which every municipality must publish its planning acts together with their spatial data. The key change is not that documents are online — they were before — but that they must be published as standardised digital data: zone and area boundaries as vectors, not as a picture attached to a resolution.
What the register contains
- municipal general plans — including vector boundaries of the 13 planning zones with the municipal urban standards,
- local spatial development plans (MPZP) and their amendments,
- formal documents: initiation resolutions, drafts laid out for consultation, adopted acts,
- zoning (WZ) and public-purpose location decisions,
- landscape audits and other voivodeship-level planning acts.
APP data — the plan as data
The technical heart of the reform is the APP data model (act of spatial planning): every zone and area gets a digital geometry with attributes — symbol, permitted-function profile, parameters. The question “which zone is this parcel in” stops requiring a look at the drawing: the answer is the intersection of the parcel's geometry with the zone's geometry. That is exactly how Centria consumes the register.
Rollout status — honestly
The register is filling up in waves, like the general plans themselves. Some municipalities have published complete vector data, some only drafts, and in large cities the digital POG zones are often still in preparation. For local plans the picture is more uneven still: new plans are born digital, but thousands of older resolutions in force exist only as text plus a scanned drawing.
Where the register has vector data, Centria reads it directly. Where a plan exists only as a document, the parcel report analyses the resolution text and extracts the development parameters for the right zone. And where there is no data at all — the report says “no data” instead of faking an answer.
Frequently asked questions
No — the register is public and free. Official extracts from plans, issued by the municipality, remain paid.
The act itself (the resolution with its drawing) is what binds. The digital data mirrors it — in case of divergence the act prevails. In practice, the vector data a municipality publishes reflects the act directly.
Usually: the general plan is still in preparation and older MPZPs have not been digitised. The parcel's planning status can still be established from the resolutions themselves — which is what the report does.
Register data — on one map
General-plan zones and local-plan boundaries from the Urban Planning Register are on the land map — and the report reads them for a specific parcel.