The attempt to make a comparative study of Lviv and Łódź in search of certain regularities seems at the first glimpse rather farfetched, because apparently there are rather few analogies between the city of Lviv with its long history and multifunctional tradition and the monofunctional, rather young, industrial city of Łódź. But deeper analysis shows that despite many differences in the course of the history of both cities, some common tendencies can be traced, such as dynamic demographic and spatial development in the second half of the 19th century based on introduction of railway transport, the building of socio-economic and spatial structures of these cities by multi-cultural local communities, and going through half-a-century period of centralized socialist economy after the Second World War.