
Seasons of Village Hosts
We follow their journeys through different maturity seasons, seeking to understand their needs and allowing ourselves to get touched by their beautiful visions for thriving rural areas.
Village Hosts bring new social, economic and ecological life to small villages and their local economy. They create new livelihoods, and good work, in emerging urban-rural markets: positive-impact tourism, nature reconnection, adventure sports, farm-shares, learning journeys, wellness retreats, work-vacations, heritage trails, and more.
To realise these opportunities, Village Hosts seek out and connect assets that may already exist in a community, but are unknown, or isolated: people, places, buildings, and skills.
Based on these new connections, Village Hosts develop services sustained by new business models: remote working, co-housing, platform co-ops and others.
Village Hosts enable diverse partners and stakeholders to work together – often for the first time. Their work is a form of green infrastructure.
Although the description ‘Village Host’ is new, similar work is of course being done at a local level by local pioneers, social innovators, and enterprising local officials.
But many more such people are needed. In Italy alone, 5,500 small villages (those with 5,000 or fewer inhabitants) have been declining; in Spain, 3,500; in Serbia, 4,700 – to name just three of the countries represented in this project.
An unusual combination of knowledge, skills and qualities are needed to be an effective Village Host.
Village Hosts need ‘hard’ capabilities such as digital skills, or business planning. But as collaboration experts – people who connect people – a Village Host’s most valuable skills are often so-called ‘soft’ ones: hosting, convening, facilitating, animating, and co-ordinating.
a) collect and publish stories
b) provide tools
c) support and enable a community of knowledge exchange
We follow their journeys through different maturity seasons, seeking to understand their needs and allowing ourselves to get touched by their beautiful visions for thriving rural areas.
From May 14 to 21, 2023 Grottole will host the European Training of the Open School for Village Hosts, an Erasmus + project coordinated by
Among the several things to be done when approaching a community, I would like to stress two in this post: getting to know a community and co-designing with it.
Design in the 21st century is neither the subject nor object; rather, it is a method for defining why one or other solution or design intervention is needed.
In Roman religion, every place inhabited and frequented by humans is characterized by the presence of a supernatural entity: the Genius loci.
Depopulation of rural areas, caused by a combination of population loss and population aging, keeps hindering their socioeconomic development.