Abstract
The article presents the course of the evolution of the concept of urban renewal’s emergence into its current, mature, integrated form of sustainable regeneration (sustainable urban regeneration—SUR). We present how the determination of renewal areas and its goals began to be based on particular indicators, and how the importance of these analyses gradually increased in managing the implementation of urban regeneration programs. Analytical techniques using GIS were used in the analyses of the differentiation of crisis phenomena inside cities before they became popular in smart city tools. Despite the wide use of GIS to analyze the diversity of crisis phenomena within the city, the availability of data means that different spheres are characterized with different accuracy. Starting from the significance of individual spheres, the focus has primarily been on the environment, which is underappreciated in Poland. Municipalities (urban, rural, urban–rural) with regeneration programs do not perceive negative environmental phenomena as significant in assessing a crisis in a degraded area. Nevertheless, municipalities that do analyze environmental issues in regeneration programs also see the need for action and implementation of projects in the environmental sphere. In order to verify the hypothesis, the Statistics Poland (formerly known in English as the Central Statistical Office; Polish: Główny Urząd Statystyczny, abbreviated and known as GUS) data on the regeneration process was analyzed, with reference to the relationships between renewal areas and the natural environment. In order to check these dependencies (or the lack thereof), the Yule φ coefficient and Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient were used. As a result, this study showed that analysis of the level and degree of degradation of the environmental sphere is not carried out frequently enough in municipalities. Secondly, the difficulties of municipalities, especially small ones (urban-rural and rural), in their analysis of the environmental sphere are the result of poor data availability. Thirdly, it is noted that there is a relationship between the designation of environmental zones and the type of municipality. This is of particular importance for the enhancement of smart city tools for the regeneration of existing cities, esp. small ones.
Highlights
Due to the growing importance of challenges related to changing natural environments, the aim of the article is to analyze the relationship between the way environmental degradation is treated in regeneration programs and the number of projects included in regeneration programs that affect this sphere
It was noticed that a city can be treated as “smart” when it undertakes investments in social capital and infrastructure, and in the environmental sphere, especially in degraded areas
The conducted research confirmed that analysis of the level and degree of degradation of the environmental sphere is not undertaken frequently in municipalities, which is related to the poor availability of data
Summary
The evolution of the concept of urban regeneration has been taking place for about a hundred years [1] and has been proceeding differently in different countries [2,3,4,5]. The way of defining and the scope of regeneration is largely a derivative of local challenges, and of the model of urban policy in a given country [6,7,8]. The shape of regeneration policy in Europe has developed during over an almost seventy-year evolution, during which experience was shared and local conditions changed [9,10,11]. The rules for carrying out such policy with respectto the involvement of various actors have changed [12,13]
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