The objective of PoliRuralPlus is to foster a sustainable, balanced, equitable, place-based and inclusive development of rural and urban areas through improved connections, governance arrangements, and integrated territorial policies that prioritise experimentation and innovation in domains that favour bi-directional urban-rural synergies and the development of a well-being economy. Key focus will be driven by Foresight, planning and implementation of integrated urban-rural strategies. The PoliRuralPlus project aims to improve the quality of life for people living in urban and rural areas across the EU by promoting coordinated and collaborative development within the regions. The project will support 9 pilot projects (including 8 from the previous PoliRural project and 1 new project) that focus on developing rural-urban partnerships. The aim is to increase the resilience and interconnectedness of urban and rural areas. In terms of financing, the project will demonstrate successful application of funding mechanisms to support these partnerships, including public-private partnerships, crowdfunding, and other innovative financing models. The goal is to find sustainable financing solutions that can support the long-term development of these partnerships. PoliRuralPlus will validate an EU-wide regional-driven integrated territorial planning & implementation Action-Foresight Process & Tool Box, by extending the latter’s Innovation Hub through the European Digital Innovation Hubs using open-source System Dynamic Modelling & a GIS collaborative online service called Map Whiteboard, enhanced by up-to-date Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning (AI/DL) applicable algorithms. The project has an ambition to become an integral part of the New European Bauhaus due to its lighthouse success of gradual buildup of hands-on experience using up-to-date tools supporting decision-making process based on foresight principles.

Deliberative and participatory processes currently lack full legitimacy due to the exclusion and marginalisation of several vulnerable communities from democratic spaces. iDEM will address this issue in the context of marginalisation and exclusion of people who need support to fully be able to read, write and comprehend language (around six million individuals in the EU and over 90 million people globally). iDEM will lay the theoretical foundations for the analysis of current marginalisation from deliberative processes of diverse under-represented groups due to language skills and propose, implement, and evaluate inclusive deliberative and participatory spaces. It will adopt a user-centred approach for making participatory processes more accessible and inclusive, developing advanced natural language processing technologies and artificial intelligence to empower under-represented groups with tools to facilitate communication and dialog in democratic spaces. iDEM will co-create the next-generation multilingual models aimed at (1) detecting possible sources of problems in understanding messages and biases for several European languages and audiences, (2) automatically adapting texts in those languages to be accessible and unbiased for these audiences, (3) providing AI tools for enhancing the controllable generation of messages and discourses. iDEM will innovate democratic spaces with customised, user-centric technology enhancing the participation and representation of marginalised groups by providing unbiased and inclusive technology. To do so, iDEM will also build on the results of relevant past projects, and seek collaboration with related projects and relevant centres for democracy in Europe.