Dear colleagues,
Rural areas were traditionally connected with agriculture.
To compare with urban, rural areas were considered to be backward, retarded, not worthy of an
intensive research.
But the situation has changed during the last decennials. Although cities are still centres of
development within
the globalization process, many people in Europe abandon them as a result of the trends of
suburbanization and counter-urbanization.
We intend to pay our attention on transformation processes of the European countryside where
focusing on more processes occurring
there as: transformation from productive to non-productive function, from central planned to the
market oriented countryside,
from the mono-functional to the multifunctional one, from the national to European and globalized
place.
The urbanization process shows more faces in European countryside. Such a transformation generates
many impacts on natural,
economic and social processes occurring in present European countryside.
Cities make their efforts to be smart. Has the European countryside also any potential to be smart? Does smart countryside mean the same as a smart city? The Bled conference between European Commission and European Parliament from August 2018, which was dedicated to smart villages, has opened a set of questions and challenges in this sense.
We have the honour of inviting you to the EURORURAL '20 conference on SMART COUNTRYSIDE FOR 21ST CENTURY. It is the 7th of Moravian rural conferences organised by the Department of Applied and Landscape Ecology, Faculty of AgriSciences, Mendel University in Brno. The aims of the conference are as follows: to map European rural research and particular interests of investigators, to gain a space for presentation of contemporary knowledge about rural research, to continue in the tradition of international conferences dedicated to rural problems, to support intra-personal contacts among experts of different disciplines dealing with rural problems, to present South Moravian rural landscape. The conference is aimed at relatively complex view of rural problems from different viewpoints (ecology, geography, demography, sociology, economy, territorial planning), less at a research of specific problems in detail.
The conference is open for all scientists, including Ph.D. students, dealing with rural matters from universities, research institutions or other public or private bodies from European countries and around the World.
