Towards three decades of spatial development transformation in two contrasting post-Soviet cities—Kraków and Budapest

Urban structure, land use, and land cover analysis are among of the primary problems of urban planning. The paper analyses the structure of land cover in Kraków and Budapest, cities with similar past. The investigation involved 41 districts (18 districts in Kraków and 23 districts in Budapest). The authors attempted to apply a methodology to develop an approach to seek out similarities between the investigated units. Cluster analyses and GIS methods were employed to analyse land cover data provided by the European Environment Agency in the form of the Urban Atlas. This study introduces a novel approach to classifying urban structure using land cover and cluster analysis. Five clusters of districts with a similar development were identified using Ward's cluster analysis. This way similarities and differences between the districts of the cities were found. The results show that the largest differences in the development of these two cities occur in the centres and on the outskirts. The primary factors affecting the land cover in the investigated cities turned out to be the post-Soviet past reflected in the structure of development and planning systems devised after transformations.