There is a twist regarding the future of the Allotment Gardens. Can gardeners breathe a sigh of relief?
Everything indicates that the government has listened to the voice of allotment gardeners who are concerned about the future of Family Allotment Gardens (ROD). The draft amendment to the regulation on general municipal plans prepared by the Ministry of Development is beneficial for this group.
There is a breakthrough in the future of Family Allotment Gardens (FGD). Allotment gardeners had concerns about this issue in connection with the amendment to the Spatial Planning and Development Act passed last year.
The amendment introduces a new planning tool for the entire commune – a general plan. This is an act of local law, with which both local plans and decisions on development conditions will have to comply. This is to simplify, accelerate and unify procedures for spatial planning in communes. Communes have until 2025 to adopt general plans.
The general plans of the communes assume, among other things, the introduction of so-called planning zones. The regulations provided for the possibility of creating thirteen types of such zones, and allotment gardens were specified in only three of them. Therefore, the allotment gardeners feared that there was a real threat that decisions would be made regarding a significant part of the allotment gardens that would open up the possibility of their liquidation.
– The regulations open the door to eliminating gardens, and this is true all over Poland. If the general plan, which replaced the study, assumes that single-family housing will be built on the garden area, then allotment holders will not be able to do anything – said Anna Zaniewska, member of the board of ROD Siekierki in Warsaw, in an interview with “Gazeta Wyborcza”.
Will allotment gardens survive? The government has listened to the allotment gardeners
The Polish Union of Allotment Gardeners has contacted the Ministry of Development and Technology on this matter. It seems that the demands of the allotment gardeners have been taken into account. As reported by today’s “Dziennik Gazeta Prawna”, the draft amendment to the regulation on the general plans of the commune indicates that the general plans will not threaten the ROD.
The amendment – as the daily writes – consists in changing Annex No. 1. According to its new wording, the “allotment garden area” will be included in the basic profile of each planning zone.
– It is necessary to take action to eliminate emerging interpretation doubts from the applicable regulations and to verify the application of new solutions in practice. Additionally, the ministry receives the voices of various social groups regarding postulated changes in the functional profiles of individual planning zones of general plans – writes the Ministry of Development in the justification for the regulation.
It is estimated that there are around 5,000 RODs in Poland, used by around 4 million people. A kind of boom in the purchase of such plots occurred during the pandemic, when, in the face of the restrictions introduced, Poles wanted to have a piece of land where they could escape from the difficult everyday life.
