This introduction to the volume outlines the conception of the pedagogical city. The author stresses flows, or continuous exchange between citizens as specific to city life. Such flows concern also thinking, which contributes to the creation of a community that one may identify, afer Aristotle, as koinopolis – an educational community of shared thinking, ‘a great teacher’. Against the background of the condition of the global city, the conception of pedagogical city contributes to the theory of social pedagogy, and to the conception of pedagogy of place in particular (including urban community education). One may speak, in this context, of koinpolitanism – a trait of thinking capable of inspiring the flow of changes taking place in the cities of today. The papers collected in this volume contribute to the development of this idea.

The subject of research was urban and urban-rural communes in the peripheral areas of voivodships, that is outside the functional areas of their capitals and outside the Silesian agglomerations. The aim of the research was to: (1) recognize the most economically developed entities in the studied areas, (2) recognize how development factors and their combinations that can create territorial capital are perceived and used in municipal strategies. The methods included: (1) analysis of indicators (2) analysis of texts of 10 strategies of entities with a high level of development. It was found, that there was deficiency of specific factors of development and recognition of their combination as well as the lack of using them to create a competitive advantage.