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Most of the research on urban change in the formerly centrally planned countries has focused on the more prosperous capital cities of Warsaw, Prague, Berlin, Budapest and Tallinn. Thus, our understanding of on-going urban transformations in this part of the world is skewed towards a handful of urban areas. This paper takes a different approach by studying the post-socialist transformations of the socio-spatial structure of a second-tier city, based on data from Łódź, Poland. The results reveal the socio-spatial restructuring of Łódź at both the macro and micro levels. Most importantly, despite being organised at a wider scale by stable social areas, at the micro level there are dynamic processes of socio-spatial segregation throughout the city that contribute to the fine-grained fragmentation of social space. From an empirical perspective, this means that either a stable structure or growing fragmentation can be identified, depending on the scale of analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Socioeconomic disparities in urban green space (UGS) availability and environmental injustice may occur not only at the scale of whole cities, selected districts/neighbourhoods, but also at lower spatial scales, such as urban blocks or even individual buildings. The latter – microscale UGS disparities – reflect differences in UGS availability among inhabitants who belong to different socioeconomic status groups and inhabit different buildings or parts of buildings. This article evaluates whether disparities in UGS availability and environmental injustice may occur in microscale in cities characterized by low socioeconomic segregation in general, such as those located in Central and Eastern Europe. For this purpose, we identified microscale socioeconomic disparities in UGS availability in the central zone of Lodz (Poland) using the localized modelling technique. Then, using a spatial microsimulation experiment, we demonstrated that an increase of segregation in Lodz's central zone would increase disparities in UGS availability and the occurrence of environmental injustice there. We demonstrated that the way the patterns of segregation interplay with microscale disparities can be further linked with temporal evolution of housing stock and local housing policy. Our findings may be useful for urban planners to stimulate the spatio-social diversity of inhabitants by focusing on microscale UGS disparities. • Socioeconomic disparities in green space availability may occur in small spatial scale – microscale. • Microscale disparities may appear even if socioeconomic segregation is low. • Green space disparities often reflect historical evolution of housing stock. • Need for stimulating socio-spatial diversity by urban planners to promote green space equity. • Understanding that segregation and environmental justice are linked is important for urban planners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]