EU rural areas face significant challenges. They house 30% of the EU population across over 80% of its territory, yet they experience demographic decline, climate pressures, and economic and social changes. The EU's Long-Term Vision for Rural Areas recognizes these challenges and calls for better data and tailored policies to support rural transitions. Current definitions of rural areas rely mainly on population density and similar indicators. This approach fails to capture the complex relationships between rural and urban areas or the diversity of rural territories across Europe. Without adequate data at local scales, policymakers cannot design policies that match the needs of different rural communities. GRANULAR addresses this gap by developing a new understanding of rural diversity, acknowledging the multidimensionality and complexity of rural areas, thus contributing to support their just digital, economic and ecological transitions. The project works with 16 rural territories across the EU and Associated Countries through two types of Multi-Actor Labs: Living Labs co-create and test new data collection methods to support local policy decisions, while Replication Labs validate these methods across different contexts.
The project combines multiple data sources—remote sensing, crowd-sourced information, social media data, and institutional statistics—to create novel datasets at both local and EU-wide scales. These datasets inform indicators that help measure accessibility, resilience, well-being, or attractiveness in rural areas. One main output is the Rural Compass, a framework that helps policymakers and rural actors understand the factors affecting their communities and design policies through rural proofing. The project delivers a spatial-geographical data interface and policy-oriented data visualisation (interactive viewer) through the GRANULAR Digital Platform, ensuring direct uptake by local authorities, regional bodies, and EU-level policymakers. Local authorities will be able to use GRANULAR's data and tools to refine their action plans linked to the Rural Vision. Regional and national policymakers will be able to access EU-wide datasets to better understand rural diversity when designing support programs.
Social sciences and humanities play essential roles throughout the project. SSH researchers facilitate the multi-actor approach, ensuring that local voices shape data collection methods. They contribute new scientific understanding of rural diversity and analyse how rural communities build resilience. SSH disciplines also examine rural well-being across territories and facilitate dialogue between policymakers, practitioners, and rural communities about policy responses.
By mid-2026, the project will have developed new methods to produce datasets that can capture rural diversity, generated analyses on rural challenges and transitions, tested data collection methods across 16 territories, and delivered a methodology for rural proofing building on the Rural Compass for ongoing use by rural actors and policymakers.
Website:
https://www.ruralgranular.eu/(öffnet in neuem Fenster)
