Rural areas face challenges such as a shortage of highly skilled labour and economic competitiveness, an increasingly ageing population, poor accessibility and declining quality of public services. Insufficient resources and capacity hinder effective policy responses to this broad challenge.
RurALL developed a multi-stakeholder governance model to support rural areas in addressing this challenge. Using a cross-sectoral and interdisciplinary approach and supported by intensive community engagement activities based on the principles of the New European Bauhaus, the project presented vacant housing as a tool and potential to address rural depopulation.
ZSI provided the community engagement process to find ideas for vacant, underused buildings in need of renovation in order to (re)revitalise the area. In Austria, the process was implemented in the municipality of Eberau in Burgenland to showcase the generation and potential implementation of new uses for vacant buildings – from mapping buildings to finding new ideas via design thinking to identifying business models for new uses of the renovated buildings.
