Re-scaling the Rural (Some Reflections from Europe)

Existing as it does on the brink of being overrun, urbanized or abandoned, rurality is contested. Even in the field of academia, it is often questioned or considered a minor subordinate appendix to urbanity.

Since the ancient Greeks, conceptions of the rural have praised it as an idyllic and tranquil place where humans were closer to nature. Nowadays however, notions of the countryside are more complex, it is also a place in constant flux, a place defined and controlled by the urban. Can rurality continue to depend on the urban? Or will future scenarios recognize it for its potential to live truly ‘closer to nature’ and as the place to be? What can we learn from current counter-urbanization movements that have sprung up in the wake of changing geopolitical circumstances as well as geographical and social inequality?

Re-scaling the Rural aims to generate a broader understanding of contemporary rurality as it exists in different countries, seen by different disciplines in the context of different scales in space and time. Rurality may become the place that answers to the Anthropocene and its crises of pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, wars and rising inequalities. The publication combines conceptual and practical explorations, from the outside-in (urban viewpoints) and inside-out (departing from an unknown rurality).