Economic suburbanisation in the Wrocław agglomeration

The aim of this article is to empirically identify and measure economic suburbanisation in the Wrocław agglomeration area between 2008 and 2024. The analysis, based on REGON data, captured the physical relocation of business headquarters from the city of Wrocław to the suburban zone and examined the scale and structure of this migration. During the study period, 24.1% of the increase in the number of firms in the suburban zone resulted from migration from the city, with a total of 4096 such cases identified (11.4% of all entities in the zone). The process primarily involved micro-enterprises (94.9%) owned by private individuals, with a predominance of the service sector (90.0%), particularly professional, scientific and technical activities, trade, and construction. The study confirms that economic suburbanisation constitutes a significant component of the contemporary spatial and economic transformation of Central and Eastern European metropolitan areas, exemplified by Wrocław and its suburban zone.