Skip to main content

Overview

© Thünen-Institut/Annett Steinführer

Our research in the Thünen topic "Rural Areas" is broadly diversified. The activities can be grouped as follows:

  • Monitoring of rural areas: spatial typology, indicators, population surveys; further development of the “Landatlas” and accessibility analyses

  • Living conditions and economic development: regional developments and spatial disparities; social inequality, labour and income; settlement development and spatial mobility; social commitment; entrepreneurship, location factors and innovation; provision of public services

  • Governance, policy impact assessment, evaluation: policy design options and funding architecture; impact of policy measures

 

All content

[Translate to English:] Mehrgenerationenhaus, gefördert im Rahmen der Gemeinsamen Agrarpolitik der Europäischen Union
Rural development policies

Rural development policies aim at improving living conditions in rural areas by promoting basic services, economic activities and social participation.

More
Schilder als Richtungsweiser in verschiedene Richtungen unter anderem zur Toilette, zu Bus und Bahn und zum Rathaus
Basic service provision between retrenchment, restructuring and expansion

Basic services - these include schools, water pipes, family doctors as well as the firefighters or broadband internet, in short: all the essentials that make up or should make up basic local services. But not everything is available to the same ...

More
Safeguarding local supply facilities - problems and possible solutions

The store is gone, the children have left home, and the bus doesn't even run during the school vacations - especially for older people in rural areas, local supply can become a problem. In many places, village stores have disappeared from the local ...

More
Innovative solutions for rural basic service provision

As rural populations are getting older and smaller, established basic services reach their limits. How can new approaches help?

More
Living and working in rural areas

Even in the "century of cities," people are not only concentrated in large cities, but remain anchored in rural areas. Settlement structures and living situations have changed fundamentally within just a few decades.

More
Das Foto zeigt Hinweisschilder auf dörfliche Ortsteile einer ländlichen Kleinstadt.
Municipal area reforms

The territorial and, in particular, the municipal reforms of the past decades have fundamentally changed villages and small towns in rural areas. Thousands of villages and quite a few smaller towns have lost their political and administrative ...

More
"Rural living conditions in transition 1952, 1972, 1993, 2012": a unique long-term study

Ten West German municipalities have been studied regularly since the 1950s, and four East German municipalities have supplemented the long-term study since 1993. Longitudinal analyses such as these are very rare in social research, because effort and ...

More
Thünen explains
More

Load more

Download Service

Scroll to top
Follow us
[Translate to English:] Logo des Bundesministerium für Ernährung und Landwirtschaft