Small towns are an important element of settlement network. They change their status depending on, among others, the development of industry, and changes in the transportation system. Some of them lost civic rights, then regained them, and sometimes were incorporated into the neighboring agglomerations. Some small towns have merged together to create new structures in the settlement network. This article investigates this phenomenon on the example of south-west of Poland. It was also found that in several cases, a small town subsequently separated from the urban area and created a separate urban unit of its own.
The article is part of the trend of research on revitalization. It presents the methodology of the process of diagnosis and separation of the degraded area from the revitalized one, for the needs of the Local Revitalization Program. The article describes the stages of the process, the examples of used measures, as well as problems appearing at diff erent stages of the study. The methodology is presented on the example of the small town of Wojkowice from the Śląskie Province.