Smart rurality and regional inequalities: Introduction to the Special Issue

Smart development has emerged as a prominent strategy for promoting sustainability, economic growth, and improved quality of life through the integration of digital technologies into everyday life. However, dominant understandings of smart development remain strongly rooted in smart city discourse and urban-centered models of progress. This raises questions about the applicability and implications of smart development in rural, peripheral, and socially vulnerable regions where spatial and social inequalities intersect. This article introduces the EURS Special Issue “Smart Rurality and Regional Inequalities,” which critically examines the relationship between smart development and regional inequalities, focusing on whether smart agendas can reduce or reinforce sociospatial exclusion. The Special Issue responds to calls for more place-based and spatially sensitive approaches that acknowledge rural realities, territorial diversity, and urban–rural interdependencies, while advancing bottom-up conceptualizations of smart rurality beyond narrow technology-driven interpretations of “smartness.” The contributions reconceptualize smart development as context-sensitive, community-embedded, and more-than-digital, emphasizing social innovation, local needs, and participatory development processes. At the same time, they identify key challenges associated with current smart development agendas, including conceptual vagueness, structural constraints in rural regions, uneven access to digital capacities, and the dependence of innovation opportunities on existing territorial conditions. Overall, the Special Issue contributes to a more sociospatially inclusive understanding of smart development by critically examining its potential both to address and to deepen regional inequalities in rural and peripheral areas.