Urban Regeneration as a Specific Type of Public Policy Response to Urban Decline. The Case of Poland

Abstract The paper examines the issue of whether the process of policy formulation and implementation on urban regeneration in Poland is done pursuant to the rules of a cycle of public policy-making. This is carried out through the use of the functioning cycle of public policy in Poland proposed by Zybała (2015) that stresses the specificities of Polish conditions in the public policy-making. Hence, the aim of the study is to provide an overview of public policy-making on urban regeneration in the context of legislative and institutional-administrative practices. In the light of increasingly complex challenges faced by cities, there is a need for the necessary counter-balancing regeneration measures taking a form of state sponsored public policy. Therefore, the Act on Regeneration was adopted in 2015. The paper concludes that the adoption of this Act was dominated by the legislator which, with relatively little contribution from other stakeholders, resulted in a rather unambitious set of legal provisions on regeneration that have not substantially changed the instrumental approach of local authorities to urban regeneration.