Results
Over the course of the project, GRANULAR has delivered a coherent and integrated set of results that renew how rural areas are understood and how public action is designed in Europe. By combining advanced data analysis with knowledge co-produced in rural territories (with GRANULAR Multi-Actor Labs), the project moves beyond one-size-fits-all approaches and supports place-sensitive, evidence-informed, and just rural transitions.
In doing so, GRANULAR contributes to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of Rural Europe.
Conceptualising Rural diversity
GRANULAR Rural Diversity Compass is a tool designed to capture the multiple ways rural areas function and evolve. It structures rural diversity around four key functionalities: Residential, Productive, Environmental and Recreational. The Compass reveals place-specific development dynamics, highlighting how different combinations of functions shape local opportunities and vulnerabilities.
Building on this framework, GRANULAR has developed:
👉a new set of territorial typologies based on multi-criteria classification methods, linking them to policy support and where functional perspectives need to be added or revised
👉a Novel Territorial Typology, offering a basis for more precise analysis and better targeted policies for Europe’s changing rural landscapes
Measuring Rural Diversity
Providing access to rural data at different levels of granularity and detail.
GRANULAR has combined multiple data sources—remote sensing, crowd-sourced information, social media data, and institutional statistics—to create novel datasets at both local and EU-wide scales.
The results include:
👉 Screening of data relevant for characterising rural diversity in Europe
👉 Benchmarking of performance and costs at different geographical scales
👉 Novel Data and Methods produced for replication, validation and upscaling
👉 Practical Guidelines for local data collection and use at different stages of the planning process
Discover all the GRANULAR evidence:
👉GRANULAR Novel Data, summarised in 9 Data Fiches on accessibility, mobility, rural economies, land use, and rural attractiveness
👉Complemented by 27 Data Fiches summarising key information for different external datasets that capture a wide range of rural data types
Understanding Changes
Analytical frameworks and tools to support transition pathways and thematic action.
GRANULAR has developed improved rural indicators and thematic analyses to track trends, drivers, and resilience across digital, economic, and ecological dimensions.
Analytical findings cover five themes:
👉 Climate Neutrality
👉 Socio-economic Resilience
👉 Food systems and Land tenure
👉 Well-being and Quality of life
👉 Rural Attractiveness and perceptions
👉GRANULAR Tools & Thematic Analyses, summarised in 5 Indicator Fiches on climate neutrality, socio-economic resilience, land use, wellbeing, and rural attractiveness.
Rural proofing mechanisms
Rural proofing is the process of reviewing policies through a rural lens and to make these policies fit for purpose for rural communities. GRANULAR translates evidence into policy action through rural proofing, a process that assesses how policies affect different types of rural areas.
Building on the Rural Diversity Compass and project data, GRANULAR has developed evidence on:
- Guidelines for rural proofing, tailored to diverse territorial contexts
- Pilot applications of rural proofing on selected local policies
- Recommendations for more place-sensitive and tailored rural policies.
By grounding rural proofing in empirical evidence and local validation, GRANULAR supports policies that are fit for purpose in diverse rural contexts.
Digital platform
The GRANULAR Digital Platform is an online and open-access interface for exploring existing and newly sourced novel data and indicators on rural areas.
The Digital Platform integrates:
👉 datasets generated from a wide range of methods and primary data, such as remote sensing, crowd-sourced data, mobile phone data and web scraping.
👉insightful analytics and visualisations of rural areas and their diversity.
Practice abstracts
