Abstract
The European Union is actively promoting the idea of “smart villages”. The increased uptake of new technology and in particular, the use of the internet, is seen as a vital part of strategies to combat rural decline. It is evident that those areas most poorly connected to the internet are those confronted by the greatest decline. The analysis in this paper is based on Poland, which at the time of EU accession had many deeply disadvantaged rural areas. Using fine-grained socio-economic data, an association can be found between weak internet access and rural decline in Poland. The preliminary conclusions about the utility of the smart village concept as a revitalisation tool for rural Poland point to theoretical and methodological dilemmas. Barriers to the concept’s implementation are also observed, although there is a chance they may be overcome with the continued spread of information and communication technologies in rural areas.
Highlights
In the past decade European countries have been undergoing a transformation towards an information society, and the changes taking place depend on global technological development.Rural residents are a part of this process
The attention of rural stakeholders is turning to the concept of smart villages, an idea that raises
The attention of ruralrural stakeholders is standard turning toofthe concept of smartdevelopment villages, an idea thatonraises great hopes for improving residents’
Summary
In the past decade European countries have been undergoing a transformation towards an information society, and the changes taking place depend on global technological development.Rural residents are a part of this process. Adjusting to the changes is not so much an opportunity as a necessity, as more and more types of activity are performed in the virtual world. This allows distances to be “reduced” and goods and services, especially public ones, to become more accessible. In this context, information and communication technologies are treated as a chance to overcome development difficulties [1,2,3,4,5]. Its absence or poor accessibility deprives a given area of opportunities for smart development [6,7,8,9]
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