Does Environment Matter in Smart Revitalization Strategies? Management towards Sustainable Urban Regeneration Programs in Poland

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.