On 3 March 2026 the RURBANIVE project inaugurated the first session of its RURBANIVE Forum, a new policy dialogue platform dedicated to exploring how EU policies can better capture the interdependence between urban and rural territories. The event focused on the recently published EU Agenda for Cities (2025) and examined it through a rural–urban lens, drawing on expert interventions and project evidence.
RURBANIVE: A Project Built on Urban–Rural Interdependence
As Kostas Naskou, from ICCS and RURBANIVE coordinator, highlighted this is an EU-funded Horizon Europe project designed to understand and articulate the evolving dynamics between cities, towns, suburbs, and rural areas.
He highlighted how RURBANIVE is developing a diverse set of territorial “enablers”—from training to land restoration, to digital tools—each designed to strengthen rural–urban linkages.
Mr. Naskou also underlined the project’s strong immersive dimension, noting that RURBANIVE is building augmented and virtual reality applications to make these enablers accessible and understandable for local communities. This ties into the project’s core principle: placing rural citizens at the centre of co-creation—both for developing services and shaping the policies discussed in the Forum.
He concluded by emphasising that the project’s “community store” and community of practice will provide a shared space for tools, services and debate, creating an innovation framework that can be replicated across Europe. Through financial support to third parties, RURBANIVE is already expanding this model with six additional enablers in six more countries, strengthening its Europe-wide footprint.
The RURBANIVE Forum
The RURBANIVE forum — organised by AEIDL as the projects’ EU policy lead and conceived as a recurring series of online and hybrid meetings over the next 18 months — aims to become a central space where policymakers, practitioners, and researchers jointly analyse new EU policy developments and their territorial consequences; each session will focus on a specific policy topic, such as housing, service provision, digitalisation, and more.
The project seeks to translate evidence into actionable policy guidance, particularly as the EU reshapes a number of critical frameworks, such as:
- the Agenda for Cities (2025)
- the upcoming Right to Stay initiative
- the European Affordable Housing Plan (2025)
- the design of the post-2027 EU financial framework
Participants were also pointed to a series of analytical resources the project has already produced, including RURBANIVE Policy Brief #1 (2025), which outlines the prospects for EU rural–urban policies in the next programming period.
Opening the session, Serafín Pazos Vidal, policy lead within RURBANIVE, described the Forum as:
“A space of discussion and co-creation where we collectively analyse emerging EU initiatives and translate evidence into policy recommendations.”
The project builds on the intellectual foundations laid by the RURBAN Preparatory Action (2010–2013), which first established a policy basis for integrated rural–urban thinking.
Keynote: Jan Olbrycht Calls for Renewed Policy for urban rural links
The keynote address was delivered by Dr. Jan Olbrycht, a leading figure in European territorial policy. As Mayor, regional president and MEP 2004 to 2024, and President & Founder of the European Parliament’s URBAN Intergroup, he became one of the principal architects of the EU’s modern approach to urban and regional development. His leadership also extended to cohesion policy negotiations, as he was the Parliament’s standing rapporteur for the Multiannual Financial Framework and held senior positions in both the Budgets and Regional Development (REGI) committees. His earlier work leading the RURBAN Preparatory Action (2010–2013) laid the conceptual foundations for integrated rural–urban policy thinking.
Drawing on this extensive experience, Dr. Olbrycht provided participants with a structured reflection on how EU urban policy has evolved over the last two decades. He emphasised that today’s Agenda for Cities (2025) must be understood not in isolation, but as part of a long trajectory that includes successive cohesion policy reforms, the emergence of integrated territorial tools, and the gradual institutionalisation of urban policy within the EU system.
A central point in his contribution was that the urban agenda has never been solely about cities: it has always needed to account for flows, interactions, and functional territories that extend well beyond municipal borders. In this sense, he argued, rural–urban linkages are not an “addon” but a structural feature of territorial development—and thus essential to correctly interpreting and implementing the new Agenda for Cities.
Dr. Olbrycht also reiterated that while the Agenda for Cities provides important impetus, its effectiveness will depend on whether policymakers recognise what he called the “territorial continuum”: the interdependent economic, environmental, and social systems connecting metropolitan centres, towns, and rural regions. The absence or weakness of this dimension, he warned, can lead to fragmented policy solutions that fail to reflect how people actually live, move, and work across territories.
Finally, he encouraged the RURBANIVE Forum to act as a bridge between institutions, research, and practice—ensuring that evidence from Horizon Europe projects feeds into the next round of EU policymaking, particularly the post-2027 cohesion policy architecture. His intervention set the strategic tone for the discussions that followed, underlining the Forum’s potential role in shaping a more integrated and territorially coherent EU agenda
Agenda for Cities: Key Issues Highlighted in the Debate
Following the keynote, Serafín Pazos Vidal and Janne Sinerma, co-author of the RURBANIVE Policy Brief series, presented the project’s emerging analysis of the Agenda for Cities (2025) and other ongoing EU initiatives such as the Affordable Housing Plan. The contribution from EUROCITIES was also considered in detail.
They emphasised several points:
- The Need for a Clear Rural–Urban Dimension
The Agenda for Cities focuses strongly on metropolitan challenges but contains limited references to territorial interdependencies, creating a risk that urban and rural policy streams diverge.
- Links to Parallel EU Processes
Participants discussed the alignment between the Agenda for Cities and:
- the European Affordable Housing Plan (2025);
- the forthcoming Right to Stay initiative;
- the reconfiguration of cohesion policy in the post-2027 era;
- the evidence and recommendations summarised in the EPRS Briefing on the Agenda for Cities (2025);
- the contributions of networks such as Eurocities, highlighted in the Eurocities briefing to the REGI Committee (2026).
- Policy Gaps Identified by RURBANIVE
Both speakers pointed to policy gaps that the Forum aims to address in upcoming sessions:
- linking housing pressures with regional labour and mobility systems;
- ensuring access to services across sparsely and densely populated areas;
- supporting digital and technological transitions that work across territorial types;
- improving measurement frameworks to capture flows, interactions, and functional linkages between territories.
Next Steps
The organisers announced that subsequent Forum sessions will explore thematic areas such as:
- housing affordability;
- access to public services;
- technological solutions for territorial cohesion;
- governance models for rural–urban partnerships.
Sessions will involve external experts, local development actors, and EU institutions, with the aim of producing consolidated policy recommendations ahead of the next major EU policy cycle.
