Rethinking Left-behind Places through Remote Working? Insights from Remaking Project

The transition to digital work, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, may create opportunities for left-behind areas affected by population decline, limited access to high-quality jobs and essential services. Indeed, RW offers the potential to attract skilled workers, diversify local economies, and stimulate development. If RW can be seen as a means of sustaining rural communities, both by encouraging people to remain in or relocating to communities suffering from population decline, it cannot be assumed that this “rediscovery” of left-behind places will result in a long-term, significant revival of these areas. Indeed, it is unclear whether the process of urban dwellers relocating to rural areas will continue in the future, and what impact this will have on rural development; moreover, it is also likely that some territories will prove to be more attractive than others for urban dwellers, resulting in an uneven distribution of benefits between rural areas within and across different metropolitan regions. New risks of competition, “colonization” of left-behind places by urban centers, new services demands, are only few of the challenges connected to RW framed as an opportunity for territorial development.

Building on the initial findings of the Horizon Europe project “REmote-working Multiple impacts in the Age of disruptions: socioeconomic transformations, territorial rethinKING, and policy actions” (REMAKING), our contribution assesses the social-spatial implications of RW in mid-sized European cities, focusing in particular on Bologna (Italy) and its Apennines. Here, the comparative advantages of left-behind areas (e.g. housing affordability) represent a significant driving force behind RW implementation: while remote workers gradually “repopulate” shrinking areas, new challenges have to be addressed. Using a mixed methods approach based on a survey and qualitative fieldwork, the project critically examines how “left-behindness” is transformed by and through remote working implementation programmes.