Creative capacity for sustainable development: A comparative analysis of the European and Turkish rural regions

Creative capacity studies mainly focus on urban regions, however the late rural studies showed that rural region has a great potential in terms of five components of this capacity viz. knowledge, innovation, entrepreneurship, creativity and networks. This study aims to evaluate which component is relatively important to identify the level of rural creative capacity. The study focuses on 77 villages from Europe and Turkey by deploying the data obtained from the survey questionnaires. This is a first attempt at settlement level to measure the opportunities of rural regions. The results showed that traditions are the most important component in both European and Turkish cases.