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UNESCO has added the modernist city centre of the Polish port city of Gdynia to its World Heritage List, recognising its interwar urban planning and architecture. The designation, approved during the World Heritage Committee’s 48th session in Busan, South Korea, is Poland’s 18th World Heritage site and comes as Gdynia marks the centenary of gaining city rights. In its justification, UNESCO referred to “an urban organism that harnesses a building-block-based planning approach to develop a characteristic, compact complex of modernist architecture, with robust individual architectural expressions”.
New inscription on the @UNESCO #WorldHeritage List: Gdynia Modernist City Centre, #Poland 🇵🇱. ➡️ https://t.co/iO4B0Cjg9u #48WHC pic.twitter.com/36IYPVOWny — UNESCO (@UNESCO) July 27, 2026 Gdynia’s city centre “illustrates a critical break with historicism in the progression of turning the village of Gdynia into a new major sea gateway of the first Polish Republic between the First and Second World Wars”, it added. Granted city status in 1926, Gdynia was rapidly developed by the newly independent Polish state from a small fishing village into a major Baltic seaport, growing to more than 100,000 residents in under 20 years and providing Poland with a modern maritime gateway.
It is now Poland’s 13th largest city by population, with just under 210,000 residents, and the third largest by area when including its maritime territory. Nowy tydzień zaczynamy od dobrych wieści! Komitet Światowego Dziedzictwa UNESCO oficjalnie uznał modernistyczne centrum Gdyni za dobro o wyjątkowym znaczeniu dla całego świata.
Nie ma lepszego momentu niż 100-lecie Gdyni na to wyjątkowe wyróżnienie!https://t.co/L3WZZCJCAz — Gdynia (@MiastoGdynia) July 27, 2026 Oktawia Gorzeńska, Gdynia’s deputy mayor, who represented the city in Busan, celebrated the decision of the committee as “a wonderful gift for our anniversary and a tribute to the vision and determination of the people who created one of Europe’s great modernist cities”. The city’s mayor, Aleksandra Kosiorek, added that the decision “confirms …
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