Lessons Learned from Germany

The village of Bayerisch Eisenstein in the State of Bavaria, Germany, experiences a declining population. Located in the middle of the Bavarian Forest National Park, the village is a popular tourist destination. Nevertheless, over the years, due to a sharp decline in tourism-related activities, socio-economic activities are shrinking fast. To understand how this relates to the vitality and versatility of rural towns, this chapter analyses the walkability of residents to essential public amenities, as a proxy of the basic infrastructure of the village. With OpenStreetMap datasets, along with geospatial analytical tools, one can perform a network analysis. Additionally, the study evaluates how spatial planning regulations for rural villages play in supporting infrastructure services. This chapter demonstrates an exemplary procedure of how villages could collect and analyse openly accessible information for one or more aspects of vitality assessments, which in turn helps to support developing rural development strategies.