Outdoor Advertising in Public Space and its Legal System in Poland over the Centuries

Abstract

Outdoor advertising has a significant impact on the public space. Advertising often impairs the value of cultural and natural heritage of the site and it affects the spatial order. On the other hand, advertisements indicate the location, promote a brand, mark, and image of the company, they are inherent and integral element of cities. Visual pollution is one of the issue in Poland now, but the issue of outdoor advertisements locating in space is not a new phenomenon. The problem, undoubtedly on a different scale, existed in the interwar period. Interwar Poland legislation system had provisions and restrictions imposed on advertisements owner. In present times, an attempt to solve above problems is the so-called "Act on Landscape Protection", which introduces new tools for public space protection and allows to create an advertising code by municipalities. This article aims to assess the impact of advertising on the public space in the past and now. We compared Polish legal systems of locating advertisements in public space at interwar and present times. An expert approach was used in the impact assessment, while the whole study was based on the Leopold's matrix method. The analysis shows that the overall impact of advertising restrictions in the city had a positive impact on the public space at interwar period and also might have a positive impact on the public space at present time.