The aim of the research was to provide detailed spatial identification and explanation of the main and most characteristic demographic phenomena and processes in Poland, with particular emphasis on the specificity of rural areas and urban-rural relations. Data on population phenomena and processes were analysed by division into 10 categories of communes, distinguished on the basis of the administrative-settlement hierarchy, socio-economic functions and morphological features. The analysis includes issues related to natural and migration movements, demographic forecasts and conclusions and recommendations for regional and local development. Depopulation and its negative effects, related to, among others, the burden on security systems and social welfare, are considered to be the greatest challenge. It is also postulated to develop new demographic forecasts (current ones are not reliable for rural areas, because they do not take into account the actual scale of emigration in internal and foreign traffic). Analyses, assessments and forecasts should increasingly take into account the division of villages into their various categories in terms of their functional specificity (suburban, typically agricultural, tourist, transitional areas, etc.), and abandon the administrative division into urban, urban-rural and rural communes. In connection with the predicted and irreversible depopulation of the majority of rural areas on approximately 90% of the country's area, it is urgent to start analytical work on a national plan for the optimization of rural development, taking into account such issues as, in particular, more effective adjustment of the network of local services, prevention of further dispersion of development, reorganization of local settlement network systems, possibilities of corrections and changes in administrative divisions at the local and district level, migration-settlement and tourism-recreational policy.