The World’s Emptying Villages: Could Creative Cities Hold the Key?

Walk through rural Japan and you will find many abandoned homes: doors left ajar, gardens overgrown, teacups still on shelves. Japan now has approximately 9 million of these empty properties – known as akiya – double the number from thirty years ago, as younger generations leave for cities and never return.  

In Italy, more than 70 towns have introduced schemes selling abandoned houses for as little as one euro – not as a real estate bargain, but as a last attempt to save entire communities from extinction . Across Europe, rural depopulation is steadily hollowing out villages, emptying buildings and slowly eroding centuries of cultural heritage. 

Meanwhile, in those same years, cities have been filling up. Rents have exploded. Creative communities that built the cultural identity of neighbourhoods in Amsterdam, Berlin and Seoul have been pushed to the margins — priced out, squeezed out, worn out. Two-thirds of all global population growth between now and 2050 is projected to occur in cities . The pressure will only intensify.  

We have been treating these as two separate problems. They are one.  

The Forest and Its Trees  

Ecologist Suzanne Simard spent decades studying forests and discovered something that upended how we understand them. Trees are not competing individuals. They are connected underground through vast networks of mycorrhizal fungi – through which they share nutrients, water, carbon and warning signals. The largest, most connected trees – the mother trees – actively nourish smaller, struggling ones. And crucially, the mother tree needs the network too. A forest of only large trees, with no understory, no connections, no smaller nodes, becomes brittle. It cannot regenerate. It dies.  

Cities are the mother trees. Villages are the smaller ones. And the mycelium – the living network between them – is the flow of people, ideas, culture and creative energy that has always moved between urban and rural worlds, even when we weren’t paying attention.  

For too long, we have managed cities as if they were self-contained. As if the boundary on a map was the boundary of the cultural ecosystem. But cities do not generate culture from nothing. The raw material of cultural identity – the craft traditions, the landscape aesthetics, the food cultures, the slowness, the intergenerational memory   comes from the surrounding region. A city that lets that hinterland die is not stronger for it. It is depleting its own soil.  

The Blindspot We Need to Name 

 Most urban dwellers do not see the countryside as a resource. They see it as a retreat – a place for weekends, for holidays, for romantic ideas about simplicity. The notion that a village in rural Sicily or a valley in rural Japan is actively generating the cultural depth that feeds urban creativity  seems counter-intuitive. We measure cultural value by density, by footfall, by institutions. The countryside scores low on all of these. 

 But this is a measurement problem, not a reality problem. Research on rural investment describes a “ripple effect” – where even small investments in rural cultural spaces have outsized impact relative to their cost. Why? Because rural communities are small, intricately connected networks where a single arts centre or restored building can shift the entire social fabric of a place.   

What Happens When One Creative Makes the Move 

 Imagine a single urban creative – a designer, a musician, a filmmaker -who leaves Amsterdam and converts an empty farmhouse in rural Portugal into an artist residency. What actually happens next?  

They draw on their city network to fill it. Artists from Berlin, makers from Seoul, writers from London come for a month. They work slowly, differently, without the noise and urgency of the city. They produce things they could not have produced at home. When they return, they carry that experience back into the urban cultural conversation – new ideas, new references, new collaborations seeded in a quieter environment. The work travels. The residency appears on CVs, in grant applications, in festival programmes. It enters the urban cultural economy invisibly but permanently.  

Meanwhile, local builders are commissioned. Local farmers supply food. Local craftspeople are rediscovered. A farmhouse that was worth nothing is now a functioning cultural institution. The village has a reason to exist again.  

And the city? It did not lose that creative. It gained an outpost. A node in a wider network. The creative moves between worlds -carrying rural intelligence back into urban conversation, relieving pressure on expensive studio space, expanding the total reach of the cultural ecosystem.  

This is the circulation argument. Not charity. Not outreach. Not cultural tourism. A healthier, larger, more resilient network – one where creativity can breathe. 

Globalisation Has Already Changed the Rules 

There is one more reason this moment is different from any before it. The old logic of cultural life was built on proximity – you had to be in the city to be of the city. That logic has collapsed. A creative working from a converted farmhouse in rural Italy is now as connected to the global cultural conversation as one in a studio in East London. They collaborate on the same platforms, show in the same online spaces, access the same international networks.  

Digitalisation has removed the last geographical excuse. The mycelium already runs everywhere. Researchers increasingly define cities not by their boundaries but by their connections – as nodes in a network of people and places. ScienceDirect Under that definition, the question of where a creative physically lives becomes far less important than the question of whether they are connected, active and supported.  

Cities Already Acting on This Logic  

Some city leaders are already beginning to see this. Victoria’s Touring  programme sends the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra to eight regional centres and the Australian Ballet to rural communities that would otherwise have no access to institutions of this scale – building lasting audiences and cultural confidence far beyond the city boundary.  

In Seoul, the city government is developing branches of the Seoul Museum of Art and youth arts education centres across all five of its regions, ensuring cultural investment reaches citizens at a local level.   

Across Europe, networks dedicated to culture-led rural development – including Rural Radicals, founded in Amsterdam to connect urban creatives with vacant buildings and municipalities in need of regeneration —-are finding that the appetite for this far outpaces the available support.  

Municipalities like Ollolai in Sardinia are now explicitly inviting creatives, remote workers and cultural entrepreneurs to help regenerate their communities.  In Japan, entrepreneurs are opening countryside studios and creative communities inside restored akiya, with local governments offering grants to make it happen. The movement is already self-organising. What it needs now is city leaders willing to see it not as someone else’s initiative – but as an extension of their own cultural policy.  

The Network Is Waiting  

The buildings are empty. The land is there. There is a growingcreative appetite to leave overcrowded, overpriced cities and build something more rooted, more sustainable, more connected to place. 

We need  a new way of seeing. Not cities and countryside as separate worlds -one thriving, one fading – but as a single living network, where the health of every node matters. Where the mother tree and the smallest seedling are part of the same system. Where the flow of creativity, people and investment in both directions is not a loss but a circulation.  

The villages are waiting. The question is whether our cities are ready to see them. Not as somewhere to escape to – but as somewhere to invest in, connect with, and grow from.  

Byline: Ella Overkleeft is the Founder of Rural Radicals, an innovation studio for non-urban areas across Europe.  

All photos courtesy of Rural Radicals.