BUSINESS-03 & PARTICIPATION-02: Offering digital and coordination expertise on rural territories

Nièvre is a unique rural area in France with remarkable natural spaces: the Loire Valley to the west, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the Morvan Regional Natural Park to the east. The area is lightly urbanized, the Loire Valley is home to the majority of the county’s population, particularly in the Nevers Urban area, which co-founded the International Summit on Innovation in Small Cities (SIIVIM). The city of Nevers is the first French local authority to have been awarded the ‘responsible digital’ label and is positioning itself as a connected and sustainable region thanks to innovative digital projects.

Many of the county’s municipalities are using innovative approaches such as design thinking and developing partnerships with the world of research and the social and solidarity economy to make the Nièvre a laboratory for experimenting with new forms of rural life and addressing town-centre decline. Nineteen municipalities in the county are beneficiaries of the national ‘Petites Villes de Demain’/Small Towns of Tomorrow scheme aimed at towns with less than 20,000 inhabitants to strengthen their capacity to renovate their housing and infrastructure and support trade, crafts and local networks; enabling them to better address demographic, economic and social challenges.

Thanks to these new dynamics, municipalities are stimulating citizen participation and enabling residents to work together to design projects and shared living spaces to strengthen cohesion and inclusion within their local communities, in consultation with social centres, entrepreneurs, third places and external operators incl. National Agency for Territorial Cohesion, State, design schools, public service design agencies, NGO’s.

Nièvre Numérique wishes to provide a sounding board for these innovative initiatives, identify opportunities to model such experiments in other types of living areas in Europe, enrich local initiatives with tools and methods that work elsewhere, and finally, cooperatively develop structuring tools to better characterise the environmental, social and economic impact of the projects carried out.

Our expertise in European cooperation projects:

·       Development and coordination of partnerships between public (local authorities) and private entities at local, county, regional, national and European levels;

·       Expertise in the challenges and solutions associated with digital innovation and transformation in rural areas and their urban centres and associated social and economic issues

·       Awareness-raising and supporting local authorities in policy and practice change

·       Project writing, diagnosis and evaluation

·       Advocacy and the organisation of research visits and stakeholder exchanges