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Rural communities around the world are searching for solutions to upkeep, restore and improve local services that are deteriorating. They are exploring the potential of a digital transition along with the opportunities and threats created by new patterns of mobility and closer links with urban areas. The expansion of information and communication technologies (ICT)-enhanced applications enables rural communities to improve their quality of life. The concept of smart village is primarily about how rural communities make the best use of both ICT and social innovation by responding to the ongoing and emerging challenges. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to investigate strategies for adoption of smart villages along with the challenges faced.

A quantitative research methodology was adopted in this research. A web-based questionnaire survey was conducted to collect data. In total, 110 fully completed and useable questionnaires were received. Statistical analyses were undertaken using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS).

The results indicate that lack of budget, lack of clear strategies for development of sustainable “smart villages”, lack of collaboration between stakeholders and lack of knowledge related to “smart villages” are the most debated challenges for implementing smart village agenda. Whereas smart energy, smart healthcare, smart transport, smart education and smart water are the top five most important smart village strategies.

Despite the novel insights provided by this study, it has some limitations. Given that the research reported in this paper is based on literature review and small-scale survey, results presented are only tentative and not generalisable. The findings of this paper are limited to the UK context only. Although generalisability outside of this context may be limited, the authors infer that the results are relevant to other comparable developed countries.

Research on smart village development is rare. This paper presents a theoretical basis on the concept of smart villages. It adds to the rich insight that goes into the understanding and awareness of the current smart village strategies along with the key challenges organisations encounter when implementing smart village initiatives. This research has implications towards informing professionals and policymakers on key lessons learnt during the implementation of smart village strategies. Also, this paper contributes to the academic debate on smart village development and provides useful recommendations to both policymakers and practitioners.

The concept of smart village emerged in the European Union (EU) level policy debates on rural development in 2016, following the stakeholder-driven Cork 2.0 Declaration. It was developed through a pilot project initiative on ‘Smart, Eco, Social Villages’ and spelled out in the ‘EU Action for Smart Villages’ initiative.

While the concept of smart villages remains unclear for many, substantial work has been carried out to develop the concept and to prepare the underlying supporting instruments at the EU level over the last three years.

The aim of this chapter is to give an overview of how the concept of smart villages has evolved at the EU level and to draw some recommendations for future policy work. The chapter reveals difficulties in the utilization efficiency of the EU funds in rural areas and shows a patched landscape of fragmented policy instruments. The key arguments are that while the mixture of these tools is important, the glue that binds them together is still missing, and that the general utilization efficiency is not sufficient. The authors offer a set of five recommendations for the short to medium term, which is needed for the successful implementation of the smart approach: integration, simplification, communication, innovation, and ‘rural proofing.’

The majority of the population in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) lives in urban areas. In the year 2030, the percentage of the rural population is expected to be 14% in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 11% in the United Arab Emirates, 10% in Oman, 9% in Bahrain, 1% in Qatar, and will remain 0% in Kuwait. Like many other countries, however, GCC countries continue to invest efforts and resources toward their national agendas aimed at sustainable development. In this context, smart villages are of special interest as, increasingly, they serve as the crossroads between urban living and rural life embracing history, culture, tradition, spiritual values, and human capital. The objective of this chapter is to explore actions taken toward the development of smart villages in the GCC countries, with a comparative overview on pertaining approaches and strategies; challenges related to the implementation of these actions are identified. It is demonstrated that despite GCCs’ tremendous efforts toward developing infrastructure in urban centers, more infrastructure investment is needed with regard to key issues related to developing remote areas – including their smart networks, digital facilities, and e-governance. It is also highlighted that more research is needed, especially on issues related to the transformation of villages into smart villages, including the need for holistic approaches, policies, and strategies toward smart villages.

Smart village may be a new, and for that matter a rather fancy, concept, yet the thrust of problems and challenges that it speaks to is by no means trivial or new. Hence the imperative inherent in the smart village concept and debate is to diagnose the status quo, propose viable ways of addressing problems and challenges, build consensus about the need to take action, and to actually follow the suit at micro-, mezzo-, and macro-levels. The concept of smart village made its inroad into the policymaking and academic debates nearly simultaneously, thus suggesting that a window of opportunity exists to undertake concerted action in view of revitalizing rural areas, and so villages, across the European Union. This chapter offers an insight into the conceptual and empirical caveats and opportunities the concept and, indeed, approach termed ‘smart villages’ brings about. To this end, the genealogy and the relevance of the concept and the approach are discussed. Against this background, the content of the entire volume is elaborated. A few final remarks follow.

Smart village is a new concept and it may be the key to the European rural future. To create an operative smart system for smart villages, it needs the participation of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In the smart villages concept local needs require real local solutions; a kind of ‘I can do this for you’ philosophy. SMEs, especially microenterprises or, even, self-employed individuals, have the potential and the capacity to develop local solutions to local problems and have the flexibility to think on a very microlevel. New ideas are needed for the smart villages, new solutions, and new perspectives. The potential of success is in the SMEs, indeed. Because it is not enough to create a system, it must be operated too. Small businesses can ensure the effective functioning of smart villages.

The idea of smart villages is about people. It is intended that the rural population should be able to use all modern technological tools and get closer to the services common in an urban environment. The question is how to make rural life attractive, especially for the young generations. To this end we need smooth connections by broadband Internet and enhanced potential for mobility. It is also a social and ecological project that is driven by public efforts assisted by larger budgetary means or in the case of the EU by a good coordination of the various development funds with broader rural development goals. However, we should not believe that SMEs operating in small settlements are to become more competitive than those in big business hubs. It is needed to acknowledge that matching urban/rural balances is a matter of financial solidarity; thus, we can keep our landscapes soundly populated and protected.

This study aims to examine the nature of smart villages and the factors in their development in relation to the tourism industry in the Baltic states.

This research employed theoretical literature analysis to conceptualize the factors contributing to smart village development, discourse analysis (analysis of good smart village branding practice), a qualitative approach and descriptive analysis to analyse semi-structured expert survey e-questionnaires to identify the nature of smart villages, as well as to analyse factors in the development of smart villages in relation to tourism in the Baltic states. Specialists who represent tourism, other businesses and the discipline of economics were chosen as experts.

The experts indicated that the development of smart villages can contribute to essential and important factors in the development of tourism such as the growth of a creative economy, the development of community culture, values, traditions and symbols, the production of local food, the establishment of unique natural, cultural and recreational objects, as well as improvement in infrastructure and the introduction of new technologies.

The study contributes to an understanding of the development of smart villages, given the important factors that were examined. The smart village approach is a relatively new approach to sustainable rural development and tourism promotion. In Europe, it is a better-known approach to developing local areas and tourism, yet each region has its own distinctive features.

Smart villages are a currently discussed approach to rural development promoted by the European Union. This approach factors in the diversity of rural areas and the different nature of challenges faced by each area. The central role is assigned to local communities – formation of appropriate characteristics and attitudes that enable the creation of optimal conditions for development. This is also the result of the evolution of a Rural Development Policy, which is driven by the dynamics and direction of change of rural areas and changes in societal perception of change events in rural areas.

The implementation of this development approach at the local level requires a transformation of the current school of thinking on development and the utilization of available resources. The key role in this process is played by local governments, which are part of the local community and also represent its interests.

The chapter combines theoretical and practical issues, and represents a geographic perspective. Its first aim is to answer the question: How can local governments create the right conditions for smart development at the local level? The second aim is to discuss the smart village approach in the context of selected development concepts. This leads to a number of specific recommendations for policymakers. It also helps them to understand the approach, which is vital in the implementation of the aforesaid recommendations.

Rural society is increasingly open to a globalized world, and migration from rural areas to cities is becoming increasingly important. Many rural areas face depopulation, an aging population, and limited access to a range of services. To address this challenge, the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) involved in the concept of smart villages have much to offer. In order to streamline the debate, this chapter proposes a methodology based on resilience. Resilience is defined as the ability of a habitat or system to recover to its initial state when the disturbance to which it has been subjected has ceased. In this regard, a retrospective of rural areas is proposed based on the experience of the garden city model, for which the advantages of rural areas were evident over those of urban areas. The objective is to reconsider the intrinsic qualities of rural areas in order to recover and enhance them with the added value of the European Union (EU) Smart Villages approach. These facets will be the driving forces behind sustainable development. In conclusion, a number of recommendations are presented, including the development of a catalog, structured by regions and territories, of rural areas and their different potentials and opportunities, for the development of smart villages projects.

This chapter aims to contextualize smart rural development in Slovenia. It does so by presenting the current state of the art, addressing new interdisciplinary approaches in understanding the problems of rural areas, applying new approaches to smart rural development, and introducing a new concept.

We start our chapter by addressing the main problems of Slovenian rural areas and their inhabitants. We have made a review of initiatives and practices elsewhere and therefore here they are only summarized briefly to emphasize the most important achievements/improvements. Further, the chapter describes the state of the art in Slovenia in connection with smart and sustainable rural development, and analyzes the results contextually. It looks at the solutions and practices that local communities found to answer the existing challenges. Three promising examples are presented, related to different sectors: tourism, mobility, and innovation. The last part of the chapter contextualizes our findings and further explains our approach to smart rural development. Finally, the chapter introduces a new concept – that is, Smart Fab Village. The concept of Fab Village is built upon the concept designed for urban areas and then carefully adapted to the needs and specific requirements of rural areas.

The purpose of this paper is to rethink the focus of the smart cities debate and to open it to policymaking and strategy considerations. To this end, the origins of what is termed normative bias in smart cities research are identified and a case made for a holistic, scalable and human-centred smart cities research agenda. Applicable across the micro, mezzo and macro levels of the context in which smart cities develop, this research agenda remains sensitive to the limitations and enablers inherent in these contexts. Policymaking and strategy consideration are incorporated in the agenda this paper advances, thus creating the prospect of bridging the normative and the empirical in smart cities research.

This paper queries the smart cities debate and, by reference to megacities research, argues that the smart city remains an overly normatively laden concept frequently discussed in separation from the broader socio-political and economic contexts in which it is embedded. By focusing on what is termed the normative bias of smart cities research, this paper introduces the nested clusters model. By advocating the inclusion of policymaking and strategy considerations in the smart cities debate, a case is made for a holistic, scalable and human-centred smart cities agenda focused, on the one hand, on individuals and citizens inhabiting smart cities and, on the other hand, on interdependencies that unfold between a given smart city and the context in which it is embedded.

This paper delineates the research focus and scope of the megacities and smart cities debates respectively. It locates the origins of normative bias inherent in smart cities research and, by making a case for holistic, scalable and human-centred smart cities research, suggests ways of bypassing that bias. It is argued that smart cities research has the potential of contributing to research on megacities (smart megacities and clusters), cities (smart cities) and villages (smart villages). The notions of policymaking and strategy, and ultimately of governance, are brought into the spotlight. Against this backdrop, it is argued that smart cities research needs to be based on real tangible experiences of individuals inhabiting rural and urban space and that it also needs to mirror and feed into policy-design and policymaking processes.

The paper stresses the need to explore the question of how the specific contexts in which cities/urban areas are located influence those cities/urban areas’ growth and development strategies. It also postulates new avenues of inter and multidisciplinary research geared toward building bridges between the normative and the empirical in the smart cities debate. More research is needed to advance these imperatives at the micro, mezzo and macro levels.

By highlighting the connection, relatively under-represented in the literature, between the normative and the empirical in smart cities research, this paper encourages a more structured debate between academia and policymakers focused on the sustainable development of cities/urban areas. In doing so, it also advocates policies and strategies conducive to strengthening individuals’/citizens’ ability to benefit from and contribute to smart cities development, thereby making them sustainable.

This paper makes a case for pragmatic and demand-driven smart cities research, i.e. based on the frequently very basic needs of individuals and citizens inhabiting not only urban but also rural areas. It highlights the role of basic infrastructure as the key enabler/inhibitor of information and communication technology-enhanced services. The nested clusters model introduced in this paper suggests that an intimate connection exists between individuals’ well-being, their active civic engagement and smart cities sustainability.

This paper delineates the relationship between megacities and smart cities research. It identifies the sources of what is termed normative bias in smart cities research. To address the implications of that bias, a nested clusters model for smart cities is introduced, i.e. a conceptual framework that allows us to redraw the debate on smart cities and establish a functional connection between the array of normatively laden ideas of what a smart city could be and what is feasible, and under which conditions at the policymaking level.