As a result of changes taking place in urban water front structures and updating views on the design and functioning of public space that took place in the post-industrial era, maritime yacht ports began to appear in the most attractive regions of coastal cities. Their center-forming potential is more and more often noticed and used in the processes of transformation of waterfront areas in port cities, in order to revive water fronts and also as a tool for creating a new identity of revitalized places and interesting urban spaces.

This paper deals with the issue of shaping the public spaces in the small coastal cities. This process is influenced by radical changes in the economy of these towns: from maritime-oriented towards the tourist-oriented. In result there is a growing interest in developing new and renewing (revitalizing) historic spaces, as cities adapt to these new functions. This process takes different forms, according to the urban composition of the particular city. On the example of the Pomeranian region in Poland three groups of these cities were defined on the basis of the type of their urban composition. The more in-depth analysis of the selected cities allowed also drawing some final conclusions regarding the consequences of this process for the future of these cities and – in more general view – to the marine economy.

Blue infrastructure is not only an element related to rainwater retention in a city but also a factor shaping urban space. As a result of the impact of blue infrastructure on form, function and character of urban space, a unique space is created – an urban blue space. The subject of the article is associated with the blue infrastructure on shape and character of urban spaces, as well as water-land spatial relations within urban blue space. Author of the article analised spatial relations occurring in port cities between aquatic and terrestrial space from perspective of the land, but also water, which is an equally important part of city’s area. As a result models of two-dimensional water-land relations have been recognised and described.

The article describes important issues related to obtaining fundamental information used in the maritime spatial planning process. It presents practically aproached selected results of undertaken work, where the quality of spatial information may affect the decisions and final results of study works, therefore geoinformation is extremely important.

Maritime spatial planning is quite a new field that emerged as an idea only after 2000, with the first practical implementation after 2010. In Polish legislation, the first entries regarding the possibilities of this type of planning appeared in 2003. For the next ten years resources of necessary knowledge and human competences had been created. In this way, a considerable amount of knowledge in the field of maritime spatial planning was accumulated in Poland, and our country has become one of the leaders in scientific research in this field. Poland has enriched the MSP methodology and has proposed many new and pioneering solutions. In 2016, the Directors of Maritime Offices began developing a coherent draft of maritime spatial plan for Polish maritime areas in the part relating to the exclusive economic zone, the territorial sea and parts of internal sea waters (including the Gulf of Gdańsk) on a scale of 1: 200,000. The work on the preparation of this draft plan was coordinated on behalf of all offices by the Director of the Maritime Office in Gdynia, and the work was assigned to a Consortium consisting of the Maritime Institute in Gdańsk and the Maritime Fisheries Institute – National Research Institute in Gdynia. The Polish plan is included in the top ten plans in the world and is one of the first to have a decision-making and not indicative character. The Polish planning process has resulted in the development of many innovative solutions that are worth wider dissemination. The presented study aims to identify key problems and formulate conclusions regarding spatial planning of Polish maritime areas, as well as to propose the most important directions for further planning work. The analytical material that is the subject of the study are experience and solutions adopted in our country for maritime spatial planning.