RURBANIVE will develop 6 Rural/Urban Enablers (RUEs), innovations in six domains favouring bi-directional rural/urban synergies and a well-being economy. A digital space, the “Community Store”, the prominent result of RURBANIVE, will integrate the RUEs along with the “Community of Practice Suite” of policies, facilitating rural/urban communities to create strong synergies. The Community Store will make possible synergies and recommendations, online interaction, dialogue, collaboration, and participation of rural/urban stakeholders. Rural/urban immersiveness (RUI), exploiting the endless capabilities of immersion, will promote experimentation and innovation in rural/urban areas. Immersive campaigns emerging from co-creation activities will be tailored to the potential of 7 Rural/Urban co-Creation Labs (RUCLs) and will enable rural/urban interactions through enhanced social connectivity and experimentation. The 7 RUCLs will represent different geographical and socio-cultural EU contexts, and RUI will ensure that stakeholders across specificities are included in prototyping, testing, piloting, and demonstrating the RURBANIVE results. A novel rural/urban innovation framework, supported by social and technical innovations, will enhance territorial governance and existing policy tools by equipping RUCLs with tangible outcomes on improving their rural/urban synergies. Participatory processes will support dialogue and cooperation, enabling stakeholders to assess and evaluate approaches and scenarios that contribute further to developing synergies and recommendations. The Open Call will fund projects developing their own RUEs, based on the six RURBANIVE RUE domains, to be applied in other rural/urban areas and be available on the project's Community Store and the RUI. An inviting and sustainable ecosystem will be created around RURBANIVE to maximize the project's impact. The broad application of the project innovations will be enabled through the creation of business model.

FUTURAL aims to deliver a set of digital Smart Solutions (SS) under 5 Smart Solution domains to address pressing social and environmental challenges. An integrated metasearch platform providing a one-stop shop for SS will be the gateway to FUTURAL's solutions, enabling search and access to SS developed by similar initiatives. FUTURAL will prototype, test, pilot and demonstrate community-led social, technological and business innovations based on the proposed SS in six rural pilot areas in the EU, representing different geographical and socio-cultural contexts. An interdisciplinary consortium of partners and a multi-actor approach will pave a coherent path towards the FUTURAL innovations through joint actions and governance systems. FUTURAL will engage rural communities and pursue public-private interactions to develop new social practices that enable market adoption and widespread social change. A clearly outlined networking, EU-wide Rural Innovation Forum (EU-RIF), building on links with key organisations, networks, projects and initiatives within the European rural development ecosystem will also be developed. The project's Open Call will fund projects that will develop their own SS, based on the five FUTURAL SS domains, to be applied in other rural areas and be available on the project's metasearch platform. A vibrant and sustainable ecosystem will be created around FUTURAL to maximise the impact of the project. The broad application of the project innovations will be enabled through the creation of business models tailored to the needs of different rural contexts and social groups. Policy recommendations and governance frameworks will be co-created in multi-actor workshops in the project's EU-RIF to support, among others, the European Green Deal, the European Digital Strategy, the European Pillar of Social Rights and the EU's long-term vision for rural areas.

Representing 30% of its population and over 80% of its territory, EU rural areas are facing simultaneous demographic, climate, economic, social and environmental changes which affect their characteristics and metabolisms. Responding to these challenges requires a precise understanding of what rural areas are and what rural communities are facing nowadays. Definitions of rural areas tend to lean on population density or size. They do not provide sufficient insights into the dynamics, drivers and fluidity of contemporary diverse rural-urban relations and identities that characterize ruralities across Europe. Despite the increasing acknowledgement that rural areas are diverse and that typologies should better reflect the identities of such territories, the lack of data at a fine scale prevents such innovations. Departing from an updated conceptualisation of rurality based on the multi-dimensional nature of contemporary rural-urban interrelations and interdependencies, GRANULAR will generate new insights for characterising rural diversity based on a multi-actor and interdisciplinary approach. Based on insights from Multi-Actor Labs, it will generate novel datasets using a wide range of methods and primary data, such as remote sensing, crowd-sourced data, mobile phone data and web-scraping. This data will then be combined with a variety of existing institutional data to derive indicators relevant to rural communities for the implementation of the Long-Term Vision for Rural Areas (LTVRA), so to measure resilience, well-being, quality of life and attractiveness. This will enable GRANULAR to create a Rural Compass, that take into account the factors affecting rural communities and their functional characteristics, informing policymakers and rural actors for the design of tailored rural policies. After ensuring the up-scalability of the results, datasets, data visualization and other tools will be directly available on a dedicated platform designed by and for rural actors.