Bridging the urban-rural digital divide: taxonomy of the best practice and critical reflection of the EU countries’ approach

Abstract

This paper explores and interrogates existing approaches to urban-rural digital divide reduction. The EU and its member states are applying fragmented and diverse digitalization of territories. Any systematic review of best practice and the juxtaposition of urban and rural areas is lacking. The authors present a taxonomy of key European rural digitalization approaches and determined EU country clusters according to the extent of their use, with a critical analysis of the context of their successes or failures. The key finding is identification of digital infrastructure and virtual sphere coherence as a challenge for bridging the urban-rural digital divide.