D7.5 Thinking beyond the COVID-19 crisis: heritage-based opportunities for rural regeneration
Creators: name: de Luca, Claudia
name: Elisabet Åberg, Hanna
name: Tondelli, Simona
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2021

description: The path towards this deliverable started at the end of 2019 when RURITAGE gathered with the H2020 funded ROCK project, working on heritage as a means for development in urban areas, at the ILUCIDARe Playground (20.11.2019 | ILUCIDARE Playground: Cracking the future of heritage). At this point, the idea to establish a common vision- a European Vision paper for urban and rural regeneration through CNH was established, as described in Task 7.3 of the Grant Agreement. Nevertheless, as the Covid-19 pandemic started in Europe in February 2020 and heavily impacted not just on daily lives of all Europeans, it also refocused importance within research and policy priorities. Thus, also in line with the Coronavirus Research and Innovation approach of the EU Commission, we decided to focus the attention on the possible consequences of Covid-19 in rural areas. Beyond the various threats and generated harmed, we aimed at highlighting community crises responses and following opportunities that arose. While it was clear from the very beginning that the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic was considerably threating rural areas, posing challenges exacerbated by low available financial resources, not easily accessible health services and rare and slow internet infrastructure, at the same time, in many places, rural areas have also been considered safe shelters characterized by better daily living conditions thanks to easy to maintain social distancing and access to nature, to cultural and nature-based recreation activities. While on the one side COVID-19 caused increasing rural-urban inequalities the pandemic was also then a huge opportunity to start revealing the crucial role of natural and cultural heritage for social cohesion, local development, and mental wellbeing. For this reason, within the RURITAGE project we have looked at the main threats the current crisis is posing to rural areas, but mainly we have investigated how these challenges can be turned into opportunities for rural development and regeneration in the future. The insights and recommendations summarized in this deliverable raised up from three activities that RURITAGE carried on: - An open call for actions launched in April 2020 to collect practices to increase and strengthen resilience in rural communities. The call was opened from 9th of April to 18th of June and collected 66 actions from all over the world. Practices collected show how rural areas can cope with emergencies and it builds the basis to rethink the current crisis as a crucial tipping point for a resilient development of rural territories. - A participatory workshop that took place during the RURITAGE General Assembly on May 28th , 2020, where all project partners discussed about challenges and opportunities for the future of rural areas. - A publicly open webinar on the 8th of July 2020 to present preliminary results of this work and to discuss those with EU institutions and relevant actors in rural development (Eu Commission, Council of Europe, European Network for Rural Development). These three activities have been framed within the RURITAGE narrative, building on heritage as a driver for rural regeneration and on the six identified Systemic Innovation Areas (Pilgrimage, Local Food Production, Art and festival, Landscape Management, Migration and Resilience), as the overall driving concept of the project. Building upon local initiatives gathered from project partners and from an open call, the range of solutions developed may not be comprehensively representative of the heterogeneity and diversity of rural areas. Nevertheless, this report aims to be a source of inspiration for rural communities worldwide building on potential threats developed by the pandemic. Moreover, the linkages of these initiatives with the RURITAGE SIAs aims at further developing the idea that heritageled strategies can build community resilience and contribute to inclusive and sustainable rural development. This deliverable is based on the content of a scientific publication ‘The Covid-19 pandemic effects in rural areas- Turning challenges into opportunities for rural regeneration’ where we presented a first vision of future opportunities for rural areas based on current literature along with the practices collected through the open call and the RURITAGE partners’ inputs gather during the General Assembly. In this deliverable we have also integrated ideas and insights based on the discussion from the public webinar on the 8th of July 2020. The main conclusions of this work are recommendations at European, national and local policy level, to stimulate discussion on the future of rural areas, aiming at contributing to a participated, open, and thoughtful discussion for the sustainable development of rural communities in Europe and beyond. These conclusions are summarized in a Policy brief presented in Annex I.