The report Gender Dimension of CCIs in Non-Urban Areas addresses how cultural and creative industries (CCIs) operate within rural and peripheral contexts through a gender-sensitive lens, uncovering both structural challenges and transformative potentialities, it reveals that women are often key cultural agents in non-urban territories, yet they face persistent barriers including precarity, underrecognition, and limited access to formal networks, the report emphasizes how female creatives frequently develop alternative economies of care, collaboration, and flexibility, responding to the spatial and social constraints of rurality not by retreating but by innovating, such gendered approaches to creativity contribute to a redefinition of what counts as cultural labor and who gets to be seen as a cultural producer, case studies from across Europe demonstrate how rural women employ hybrid roles—artist, carer, entrepreneur, activist—to generate cultural value in ways that intertwine with community resilience, the findings challenge the urban-centric and masculinized narratives of creative industries by proposing a model where feminized and decentralized practices become vital to sustainability and social cohesion, the report further advocates for policy that recognizes the intersections of gender, geography, and cultural infrastructure, arguing that inclusion must go beyond quotas and funding access to support the soft infrastructures—such as informal networks, care routines, and local trust—that sustain creative work in peripheral areas, by making visible the gendered dynamics of rural creativity, the study affirms the necessity of a feminist cultural policy that understands artistic work not only as economic activity but as relational labor embedded in place, time, and affective ecologies.
KEΑ European Affairs & EENCA (2022). Gender Dimension of CCIs in Non-Urban Areas (Deliverable D5.5). European Expert Network on Culture and Audiovisual.
