Digitalization and social innovation are often discussed separately and without any spatial reference or in relation to cities, although newer works show the importance of social innovation also for rural areas. Existing digitalization projects illustrate the potential of digital technologies for rural development. Current debates on smart villages refer to both digitalization and social innovation but still in a rather unsystematic way. The paper seeks to think together digitalization and social innovation in rural areas more systemically and proposes to conceptually connect them with the help of sensitizing concepts, which are developed out of debates on social and digital social innovation. Along these concepts, the paper explores rural digitalization projects in Germany. On the one hand, this highlights the spectrum of these initiatives and, on the other hand, provides a framework under which digitalization and social innovation can be analyzed and smart villages may be supported systematically.
Digital social innovation (DSI) is commonly associated with cities. However, DSI is not limited to urban space. In rural areas, it is the inhabitants themselves who start and push digitalization projects, and collaborate with professional actors from the outside. These innovators see digitalization as a chance to solve rural problems such as scarce mobility, declining community interactions, demographic change, or urban-rural digital divide. In consequence, DSI such as smart community centers, digitally managed car-sharing, or community apps also emerge in rural areas. The article seeks to better understand the different actors responsible for the rural digitalization processes. Based on interviews, document analyses, and field notes, the article focuses on two cases in rural Germany: Wesedun is part of a regional digitalization project empowering villagers to evolve own ideas, and Wokisrab shows off a bottom-up driven digitalization strategy. Both villages are aiming to improve the quality of life. Indicated by these cases and inspired by literature on social innovation, the actor groups are identified as drivers, supporters, and users. Based on the interactions and collaborations of these groups, we introduce Smart Villagers, the bottom-up actors of rural DSI. In order to design governance processes, the results indicate that even though Smart Villagers are motivated, skilled and engaged, they want and need the support of professional actors from the outside.
Smaller towns in rural regions are important anchors for regional development, but they are not usually considered particularly innovative and open to new ideas. This paper asks how the network of small and medium-sized towns, Cittaslow, could establish slowing down as something new in local development. Against the theoretical background of sociological innovation research, an analytical framework of social innovation is elaborated to analyse Cittaslow using four case studies: two German and two Italian towns. Based on fieldwork in the four towns, this paper shows that discourse and communication on slowing down, local projects labelled as slow and new cooperation structures go hand in hand. This leads to the conclusion that new ways of local development need a communicative umbrella under which projects and stakeholders come together. The paper furthermore demonstrates that the analytical framework, with its triad of semantics, pragmatics and grammar, is extremely helpful for analysing spatial development and has the potential to be adapted as a tool for policy strategies.
Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, residents in peripheral and structurally weak rural areas began to move into the digital age. Digital tools are being used and developed to address existing challenges in rural areas such as local communication, healthcare or mobility. Against the background of a conceptual framework of social and digital innovations from a process perspective, this paper asks how the processes and dynamics of digitally supported social innovations in rural areas can be understood and described. By analysing five villages in Germany, we show that the digital initiatives – despite their different contexts, contents and driving actors – develop over three phases: an inspiration phase, an emergence phase and a consolidation phase. This dynamic process can be interpreted as “linear-circular”, because while overall a very targeted development of innovative problem solutions can be observed within the three-phase process, at the same time creative development loops and new inspirations exercise influence.
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