Territorial capital of Polish local administrative districts

One of the key elements in territorial cohesion conception is idea of territorial capital in specific region. In this article we present an attempt of the territorial capital evaluation for Polish poviats (NTS 4) in period 2003-2011. The starting point was finding variables which in accurate way could reflect the level of such capital and for which official statistics for all regions are available. We implemented a concept of territorial keys (Boheme et al. 2011) according to which the most important components of the territorial capital are: accessibility, availability and quality of services of general economic interest, territorial capacities, the ability of regions to create economic and social networks and finally presence of functional regions. The broadest of these categories are territorial capacities, which include: territory-bound factors (industrial clusters etc.), wise management of cultural and natural assets, human capital and social capital. For each of the variables we present maps showing their spatial diversity in Polish poviats. In the case of variables for which during examined period significant changes were observed two maps are presented: for the beginning and for the last year. It allowed to observe the changes of analyzed categories in Polish poviats.