# Regional Foresight

# Text Mining applied to Regional Foresight

# System Dynamic Modelling applied to Regional Foresight

# The Policy Options Explorer

# The Rural Attractiveness Explorer

In PoliRural, we observed that concepts of rural attractiveness often feature in regional development strategies, that they differ significantly from region to region, and are conditioned by developmental priorities such as the desire to attract investors, entrepreneurs, or tourists. Thus, what is understood as rural attractiveness may depend on where, when, and by whom attractiveness is determined Additionally, the attractiveness of a region can be determined only in comparison to other regions. This means that a region that is rather attractive compared to one set of regions can be rather unattractive compared to another set of regions. Due to this complexity, measuring and evaluating rural attractiveness is challenging.

Nevertheless, there is some common understanding of and agreement on the general issues that matter for rural attractiveness. These are aspects belonging to the following areas:

- social,
- natural environment,
- human-made environment,
- economic,
- institutional,
- cultural.

This minimum agreement provided the basis for the development of a Rural Attractiveness Index. This index is made up of 6 sub-indices - one sub-index for each of the generally relevant areas mentioned above. Each of the sub-indices includes a number of sub-sub indices, e.g. the social sub-index could include sub-sub indices measuring the age composition or unemployment rate of the population in a region. The Rural Attractiveness Index reflects the characteristics of the concept of rural attractiveness: The values of the Index do not represent absolute estimates of the attractiveness of a region but reflect how attractive the assessed regions are in comparison to each other. To account for the context dependency of rural attractiveness, the concrete choice of sub-sub indices needs to be determined in each individual situation in which rural attractiveness is supposed to be evaluated.

With the Rural Attractiveness Explorer, we want to enable users to explore the effects of different policy choices on the rural attractiveness of the PoliRural pilot regions. Thus, we represent the outputs of the Policy Explorer as a value of the Rural Attractiveness Index and visualise the results of that in different ways. For this purpose, we adapted the Rural Attractiveness Index to fit with the Policy Options Explorer as follows (notably, the version of the Rural Attractiveness Index used here consists of only 4 instead of 6 sub-indices):

# Comparing Rural Attractiveness across the regions of Europe

Link to Map visualization for all regions Link to ‘dots’ visualization for the project regions and its evolution over time Link to ‘disc’ visualization for the project regions and its evolution over time

# Exploring the Dynamics of Rural Attractiveness

Link to ‘dots’ visualization of sub-indices for the regions and their evolution over time

## Detailed overview of individual regions

An aggregated attractiveness index is composed of six factors: anthropic, cultural, economic, institutional, natural and social. Due to the incompleteness of data provided by different regions, we only present four of them below.

Link to ‘disc’ visualization of sub-indices for the regions and their evolution over time

# Exploring the Impact of Policy Option on Rural Attractiveness

Link to ‘disc’ visualization of impact of different options on RA for each domain Link to ‘disc’ visualization of impact of different options on sub-indices for each domain