‘We stopped designing cities’ — Tomasz Konior on the failure of Polish urban planning

During the European Economic Congress 2026, Tomasz Konior — architect, urban planner and founder of Konior Studio — put forward a thesis that reverberated across the industry: 'we have stopped designing cities'. This is not a complaint about the aesthetics of individual buildings, but a systemic diagnosis of how urban fabric comes into being in Poland at all.

Regulation has displaced thinking

The core of Konior's criticism is the over-regulation of the process. In satisfying one requirement after another — fire access roads, sanitary conditions, local plan provisions — holistic urban thinking gets lost. Urban planning, which the architect calls 'the art of shaping cities', is pushed into the background, replaced by the administration of regulations. The result is clusters of buildings that meet the standards yet fail to add up to a city — to a street frontage, a square, a street that lives.

A return to patterns

Konior is not calling for chaos or the abolition of rules, but for a change in hierarchy: rather than multiplying regulations, it is worth cultivating an awareness of the historical patterns that European cities grew from. He calls for 'restoring urban planning to its proper standing' — treating it once again as a creative discipline, not merely a procedural one. It is the voice of someone with the standing to say so: he has shaped Polish design thinking for decades and was honoured for his body of work in 2026.

At Method Press, we think this thesis matters well beyond architecture. It shows that in any field — including property marketing and sales — it is easy to mistake compliance for actually solving the problem. You can tick every box and still create nothing that works. A good development, like a good city, needs thinking about the whole, not just conformity with a checklist.