Jacek Purchla's scholarly activities are of interdisciplinary character, and his interests focus primarily on widely understood urban issues and problems connected with the development of cities. He managed to create a modern technique of an “urbanologist”, considering a city to be a complex organism, composed of social, economic, political and cultural processes. In his activities, another important emphasis was placed on research into the 19th and 20th century architecture, which he pioneered already in the mid-1970s, and in which he analysed, in an innovative way, such factors as construction law, the role of public patronage, education, political, social and economic issues. In recent years, he has initiated interdisciplinary studies in the theory of heritage and historic city management. Since 2005, he has been the founder and head of the first Polish European Heritage Department.
