The Smart Rural 21 project and its Come Along! villages visited Ostana on 16-17 May to learn about its rural mobility strategy and residency programme. The 15 visitors met the ’living books’ of Ostana, having locals telling them their own life stories… Finally, visitors walked through the hamlets of the village to learn about the architectural and housing rebirth of Ostana.

Seven members of the Smart Rural 21 project and its Come Along! villages visited Ansó on 12-13 May 2022 for a project cross-visit which featured a workshop on rural challenges and presentations of community initiatives. Visitors heard from the local school children about their recent project: an outdoor classroom focused on environment and nature. Ansó residents also recounted how the community welcomed a Ukrainian family, helped with housing, clothing, and a job opportunity, as well as integrated the children in school.

The Smart Rural 21 project and its selected and Come Along! villages visited Mukařov on 5-6 May 2022 where they saw a series of community projects, including the recent integration of Ukrainian families. Mukařov presented its smart garbage collection system, ways in which old buildings are renovated according to the most recent technologies, and other relevant projects to make the village even tidier and more liveable.

Thanks to the improved pandemic situation and the support of the hosting Smart Rural 21 villages, cross-visits and other one-to-one village visits are organised during May and June 2022.
Cross-visits allow village representatives (especially from the selected and Come Along! Smart Rural 21 villages) to get inspired, exchange, and learn from each other's smart approaches.

Thanks to a built-in translator engine, from now you can read the Smart Rural 21 website contents in any of the official EU languages. You can select the preferred language by clicking at the language selection dropdown menu in the top-right corner of the page.

Joint to the 4th Regional Workshop a cross-visit of villages was organised. The participants got inspired by community-led projects: a railway station reconstructed as a book shop & offices, a concert hall installed in a former diary plant, an art gallery that welcomes exhibitions of artists from across the World, a local community-owned mill, local boarding school for entrepreneurship and design, new GP service provided by local village doctor and more…

The workshop entitled ‘Better Connected Rural Areas – Improving Rural Mobility’ was originally planned to be held face-to-face in the Alpine village of Ostana, in Italy. However, due to the rising number of Covid cases the event was finally organised online. A cross-visit for villages to visit Ostana is planned in May 2022.

The Smart Rural 21 project is collecting and updating information on Smart Villages policy, projects, organisations, and other resources in each Member State.  Thanks to the new search engine users can identify resources by country, policy, organisation, type of action or free words. Find out more through the What’s happening in my country pages.

The two villages receive further (larger scale) specialist expert support to help realising specific and concrete smart actions planned in their smart village strategies, related to energy community and local token system in Stanz, and digital and social innovations linked to local food production, tourism and environmental actions in Penela.

Smart solutions can provide inspiration for local people and communities to start innovative local, community-led (smart village) actions. Check out the continuously growing database of smart solutions that can now be searched by keywords related to people, economy, environment, living, connectivity & mobility and governance.