Selected Legal Regulations and Cultural Aspects of Urban Development. Nowadays, the issue of urban development belongs to key elements of development in general. Urban development is a multifaceted phenomenon (covering economic, social, administrative, promotional, ecological and a number of other aspects). They are too numerous to discuss them in one short article. For this reason this paper is dedicated only to the phenomena regulated by law: physical planning, suburbanization (initially called urban sprawl), monument conservation and – additionally – culture (as a factor influencing the legal regulations). The key hypothesis is that developers are not the only ones to blame for the way the country looks. This hypothesis has generally been corroborated.

In the tumultuous period known as the “Age of Extremes”, span-ning from the aftermath of WWII to the early 21st century, several pivotal dynamics shaped the historical landscape in Europe. This era bore witness to contrasting forces: the profound violence of two world wars, genocides, a multitude of regional military conflicts, and coerced mass migrations, alongside the emergence of peace movements that played a critical role in the success of the “peaceful revolutions” in countries such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and other Eastern Bloc countries in 1989. This epoch also saw the rise of influential institutions, non-governmental organizations, and grassroots initiatives, all dedicated to fostering dialogue and reconciliation among peo-ples who had been bitterly divided by the horrors of war.

Within this context, both international textbook dialogues and binational history textbook projects assumed significant roles in the pursuit of reconciliation. Notable examples of the latter include the Franco-German Histoire/Geschichte and the German-Polish Europa – Unsere Geschichte / Europa. Nasza historia, two transnational history textbook series published at the beginning of the 21st century. These initiatives can be viewed not only as vital milestones in bilateral textbook dialogue but also as key waypoints in the broader European reconciliation efforts following WWII.

The paper contains a philosophical deconstruction of a notion of the "catastrophe" as historical phenomenon. The Author points out some characteristics of the catastrophic concept of the reality as they were expressed in the literary discourse in Poland in the period ofjin de siecle and in the poetry and prose of the WWII. The philosophical preconditions of catastrophic thinking are related to the literary expression present in narration of famous Polish poets and writers: Kazimierz Przerwa Tetmajer, Jan Kasprowicz, KrzysztofKamil Baczyński, Tadeusz Borowski and Gustaw Herling-Grudziński.