The Ruralities Living Lab Community Action Group connects communities with knowledge, experience and collaborators to develop Right to Stay strategies: practical responses that strengthen people’s opportunities to build fulfilling lives in the places they call home. This blueprint serves as a knowledge-transfer mechanism to help rural communities grow, prosper and become resilient. LOOMS will create the physical spaces where these strategies can be explored, tested and refined through living-lab experimentation. By bringing vacant, obsolete or underutilized spaces in rural, peri-urban, and urban territories back into community use, the project will establish places where residents, practitioners, researchers, enterprises and public authorities can work together to turn shared ambitions into locally-grounded action. Community-led experimentation will bring these values into practice: preserving local character and creating inspiring spaces; reusing buildings and materials responsibly; and ensuring accessible, affordable opportunities for people to learn, create and participate in shaping their neighborhood’s future. Their activities will emerge from community priorities, enabling participants to experiment with creative practice, learning, enterprise and shared services, assess their value, and adapt them in response to experience.

Pre-application consortium management coordinator: Sandra Lund, email: info@livinglabsnetwork.com

Deadline: 1 December 2026

• Type: Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Action Lump Sum

• Total topic budget: €12 million

• Expected EU contribution: approximately €4.5 million per project

• Expected awards: 2 projects

• Funding rate: normally 100% for eligible RIA costs

Projects must develop a systematic method to Identify and map vacant, obsolete, or underused buildings and infrastructure; Investigate why they became vacant; Assess community needs before deciding how spaces should be reused; Use community co-creation; Identify funding and financing mechanisms; Evaluate social, cultural, environmental, and economic value; Address risks such as displacement, gentrification, affordability, or loss of ecologically valuable space.