Disentangling rural smartness in European policies: a critical overview of the Smart Village concept
In recent years, several policies have increasingly considered smart technologies as a potential solution to overcome territorial marginality in rural areas, where digitalization and smart innovation could help local communities address challenges such as depopulation and socio-economic deprivation....
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
AIMS Press
2024-11-01
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| Series: | AIMS Geosciences |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://www.aimspress.com/article/doi/10.3934/geosci.2024041 |
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| Summary: | In recent years, several policies have increasingly considered smart technologies as a potential solution to overcome territorial marginality in rural areas, where digitalization and smart innovation could help local communities address challenges such as depopulation and socio-economic deprivation. At the European scale, the Smart Village Action was launched in 2017 to address the so-called 'circle of decline', showing to what extent rural smartness has been recently gaining momentum in transnational cohesion policies. This work aims to critically explore the Smart Village paradigm as a recently-emerged policy framework in rural, cohesion and/or recovery policies, investigating if and how it is variously (re)interpreted in policies and operationally applied in projects. From a methodological point of view, a qualitative policy document analysis (QPDA) and software-based content analysis were carried out on UE official documents, offering new theoretical insights and operational recommendations for understanding the concept of smartness beyond urban-centered perspectives. |
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| ISSN: | 2471-2132 |