Conference Agenda

The transition to sustainable living necessitates systemic knowledge-driven transformations that merge traditional, experiential, and scientific insights. This study explores the emergence of a social economy of knowledge within rural Europe, focusing on the case of lifestyle migrants at Cold Mountain Shelter in Hungary. These migrants have revitalized abandoned vineyards through innovative agro-ecological practices, bringing with them diverse resources such as knowledge, social capital, and financial investment. However, their journey illustrates the duality of such transformations: while they create value and resilience within rural areas, they also face significant challenges, including infrastructural inadequacies, policy misalignments, and limited community integration.
Drawing on workshops conducted with the Cold Mountain Shelter participants, the study examines how formal and informal knowledge systems interact in shaping rural sustainability. It highlights how lifestyle migrants act as agents of change, contributing not only to rural regeneration but also to the diffusion of transformative knowledge within and beyond their localities. The findings underscore the need for supportive governance and collaborative frameworks to address the challenges of rural gentrification while fostering synergies between newcomers and long-established communities.
By situating the experiences of Cold Mountain Shelter within broader discussions on ruralisation and the knowledge economy, this study provides valuable insights into the processes of rural transformation. It emphasizes the importance of creating inclusive knowledge networks that leverage the diverse resources brought by urban-to-rural migrants, offering actionable perspectives for policymakers and practitioners striving for sustainable rural development.

This study investigates urban-to-rural transformations within the context of sustainable development in mountain settlements, focusing on Divčibare, Serbia. A multidisciplinary approach combines physical-geographical and socio-economic analyses, emphasizing environmental quality indicators, land-use changes, and ecosystem dynamics. The research highlights how urban migration flows and anthropogenic pressures impact rural areas by transforming spatial-functional connections and contributing to sustainable rural development strategies. Identified trends, such as the decline in agricultural activity and shifts in land use toward tourism infrastructure, underline the need for integrated spatial planning. Divčibare exemplifies the challenges of balancing urbanization pressures, environmental conservation, and socio-economic growth, emphasizing the importance of fostering synergies between local traditions and innovative sustainable practices. By addressing tensions and opportunities arising from urban-rural interactions, this research contributes to understanding the transformative potential of rural settlements in adapting to broader societal and environmental changes.

The phenomenon of depopulation and ageing, coupled with its accelerating pace in recent years, has livened up the debate around the ‘demographic winter’ (Blangiardo, 2024). This concept highlights the critical demographic challenges particularly facing Italy, where projections indicate an average age exceeding 50 years by 2080 and widespread depopulation in inner areas.

Depopulation is not merely a numerical decline but a multifaceted issue with profound and far-reaching consequences. The combination of low birth rates, ageing populations, and emigration undermines the demographic structure, leading to the obliteration of settlement heritage, loosening of social networks, and weakening of infrastructural and economic systems. Such challenges threaten not only the sustainability of these regions, but also their cultural and historical identity.

Two theoretical approaches have been proposed to address these challenges. The first, based on the concept of a ‘revenge’ of the so-called ‘places that don't matter’ (Rodriguez-Pose, 2018), calls for empowering local stakeholders to optimise their territorial development potential. This perspective emphasises the need for bottom-up solutions that mobilise local resources and communities. The second approach, the ‘place-based theory’ (Barca, 2019), warns against the dangers of a ‘local under-development trap,’ where local elites are partly responsible for hindering progress. It advocates a top-down external governance intervention to introduce new planning energies.

The mountainous inner areas of the Central Apennines, notably in the Abruzzo and Molise regions, exemplify these challenges. These regions have experienced a significant decline in demographic, cultural, and economic vitality, largely driven by emigration, also due to their proximity to coastal urbanised areas.

Only in recent years, tailored policies have been developed to counter the risk of disappearance of these small municipalities. These initiatives include financial incentives to attract new residents, refurbishment of housing stock, and enhancement of cultural and historical assets. By creating a welcoming environment, these measures aim to sustain and revitalise local communities.

The case of the Central Apennines underscores the urgent need for customised, multifaceted strategies to safeguard the identity and heritage of rural and mountainous inner areas.

Counterurbanization, understood as migration from cities to rural areas beyond the commuting hinterland, has been present in Western literature since the 1970s. However, in Central and Eastern Europe, internal migration patterns following the political and economic transformations of the late 1980s and early 1990s have been dominated by suburbanization and rural depopulation. Counterurbanization has been studied much less frequently, and its specific characteristics in the region remain largely unexplored.

In this context, a novel research question arises: does Central Europe experience counterurbanization with a delay resulting from its history of socialist urbanization and the emergence of market economy only in the 1990s? The talk is a presentation of the results of a quantitative study on the intensity and directions of migration from metropolitan areas to the peripheries in Poland between 1989 and 2023. It also situates counterurbanization within the broader context of other types of internal migration and key events in Poland's and Europe’s recent history, such as accession to the European Union and the COVID-19 pandemic. The research is based on an analysis of matrices of registered inter-municipal migrations - one of the largest and most detailed datasets of its kind in Europe. The interpretation of post-pandemic trends is further enriched by findings from a parallel qualitative study.