Rural

Michael Woods

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136919176
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences physiques
• Subtopic: Géographie

The division of 'rural' and 'urban' is one of the oldest ideas in Geography and is deeply engrained in our culture. Throughout history, the rural has been attributed with many meanings: as a source of food and energy; as a pristine wilderness, or as a bucolic idyll; as a playground, or a place of escape; as a fragile space of nature, in need of protection; and as a primitive place, in need of modernization. But is the idea of the rural still relevant today?

Rural provides an advanced introduction to the study of rural places and processes in Geography and related disciplines. Drawing extensively on the latest research in rural geography, this book explores the diverse meanings that have been attached to the rural, examines how ideas of the rural have been produced and reproduced, and investigates the influence of different ideas in shaping the social and economic structure of rural localities and the everyday lives of people who live, work or play in rural areas.

This authoritative book contains case studies drawn from both the developed and developing world to introduce and illustrate conceptual ideas and approaches, as well as suggested further reading. Written in an engaging and lively style, Rural challenges the reader to think differently about the rural.

1
APPROACHING THE RURAL

WHY RURAL?

Rural space has many functions and many meanings. Rural areas produce most of the world’s food, and capture most of its water supply. They are the source of most of our energy – whether from fossil fuels or renewable resources – and the origin of most of the minerals that feed industry. Historically, at least, rural areas have provided society with fibre for clothing, stone and timber for building, and wood pulp to make paper. Rural areas have also become our playground – a place to walk, ride, cycle, sightsee, or simply escape in search of a slice of tranquillity. They are valued for their scenic landscapes and for their natural environments – rural areas host the vast majority of the globe’s plant and animal species. Rural areas are also home to diverse indigenous cultures, and can be venerated as places where elements of traditional, pre-industrial ways of life may be glimpsed. As such, rural areas are frequently endowed with symbolic importance as signifiers of national identity, or as the counterpoint to modernity. Rural areas are celebrated variously both as wilderness and as a bucolic idyll. Yet, they can also be portrayed as remote, backward, under-developed places, in need of modernization.

The varied functions and meanings that have been attributed to rural space have made the rural into an ambiguous and complex concept. The rural is a messy and slippery idea that eludes easy definition and demarcation. We could probably all instinctively say whether any given place was rural to us, rather than urban, but explaining why it was rural, not urban, and drawing a boundary line between urban and rural space on a map are altogether more difficult tasks. As different individuals will disagree on the meaning of rurality, and on the emphasis to be placed on different functions of rural space, so the rural is recast as a heavily contested space.

Indeed, it is the complex and contested nature of the rural that has positioned rural space as central to many key issues facing contemporary society. Debates about global food supply, for example, may be articulated through the urban-based media and political arenas, but they directly concern the management of rural space (Plate 1.1). The challenge of ensuring global food security demands that we consider the extent to which food production should be prioritized over other uses of rural land, and whether we are prepared to pursue more intensive and hi-tech forms of farming (such as genetically modified crops) that carry both environmental risks and threats to traditional social structures, such as the family farm. Similarly, pressing issues of energy security, adaptation to climate change, tackling global poverty, controlling migration, preserving biodiversity and respecting indigenous cultures all raise difficult questions about the meaning, function and management of rural space.

Plate 1.1 The ‘global food crisis’ connects urban and rural (Photo: author)

This book is about the meanings attributed to the rural, and how these diverse meanings have shaped the social and economic structure of rural localities and the everyday lives of people who live, work or play in rural areas. It discusses studies by rural geographers that have examined these processes and their effects, and also reflects on the ways in which the study of rural geography has itself been informed by different ideas about rurality. This book is intended to be forward-looking, capturing the richness and breadth of contemporary research in rural geography, but also anticipates some of the themes and approaches that will be the focus of rural geographical inquiry in coming years. In order to do this, however, it is first necessary to consider the historical development of ideas about the rural, and their application in rural geography. The remainder of this introductory chapter consequently presents a brief overview of the development of rural geography as a field of academic study and of the conceptualization of the rural within rural studies. It also considers briefly the origins of the term ‘rural’ and its usage in popular language – an analysis that is developed further in the next chapter, which presents a more detailed examination of the production and reproduction of the rural as an idea, its imagination and representation in popular culture, and its translation into material form in the landscape.

STUDYING THE RURAL

The city and the country

The distinction between ‘urban’ and ‘rural’, between the city and the country, is one of the oldest and most pervasive of geographical binaries. The terms may have originated as a way of differentiating between the enclosed and defensible spaces of early towns (Box 1.1), and the open and uncontrollable spaces that lay outside, but they soon acquired greater symbolic significance as they became embedded in language and culture. As Raymond Williams observed, ‘“country” and “city” are very powerful words, and this is not surprising when we remember how much they seem to stand for in the experience of human communities’ (1973: 1). For Williams, the two terms were inextricably connected and the connection represented the progression of human society. As such, he noted, both the ‘country’ and the ‘city’, the ‘rural’ and the ‘urban’, had collected powerful feelings and associations:

Box 1.1 RURAL, RURALITY, COUNTRY AND COUNTRYSIDE

The English language uses several terms that relate to the idea of rurality or to rural space. The pairings of rural/rurality and country/ countryside can be traced back to different Latin roots which both reflect something of the character of being rural. ‘Rural’ emerged as an adjective linked to the Latin noun rus, meaning an open area (Ayto, 1990). The adjective form stuck and was incorporated into several European languages to refer to something relating to those areas outside cities. The derivative ‘rurality’ appeared in the eighteenth century to refer to the condition of being rural, probably borrowed from the equivalent French term ruralité. ‘Rural’ was also used for a time as a noun to refer to people from rural areas, and has more recently been employed again as a noun in academic writing to refer to an abstract space that exhibits the characteristics of being rural but is not necessarily tied to a particular territory – as in the chapter headings for this book.

The word ‘country’ derives from the Latin preposition contra or ‘against’, and in its original Latin form originally meant ‘the land spread out around one’. It hence became used to refer to an area of land, and subsequently both to the land set against the town and to the land belonging to a particular people or nation, and these two usages have remained closely associated. The term ‘countryside’ originally emphasized the definition of the country relative to the town (the ‘side’ of the town), but expanded to take on a broader, and symbolically laden, meaning in British popular culture (Bunce, 2003). However, as Bunce (2003) notes, ‘countryside’ does not have the same emotional charge in other English-speaking countries, where it has not been widely used, at least until recently. Where ‘countryside’ is used in North America, for example, it tends to retain more of its original meaning, being mainly applied to rural areas close to urban centres in regions such as New England and southern Ontario.

‘Rural’, ‘rurality’ and ‘rural areas’ tend to be preferred in academic and official usage over ‘country’ and ‘countryside’ probably because

they sound like more neutral, objective terms, with ‘country’ and ‘countryside’ arguably more redolent with cultural meaning (interestingly, ‘rural’ was once synonymous with ‘rustic’ but the latter term has evolved a more specific meaning). There are though few rational grounds for this, and ‘rural’ is commonly used as the adjective for the countryside. Take, for example, the government bodies responsible for rural policy in England: the Countryside Commission and the Rural Development Commission were merged to form the Countryside Agency, which then became in reduced form the Commission for Rural Communities.

‘Rural’ has the advantage of being common to several European languages, including English, French, Italian and Spanish, whereas many languages do not have a direct equivalent to the term ‘countryside’. Significantly, many languages employ terms to refer to rural areas, or rural people or the rural landscape that emphasize either connection to the land and agriculture, or to national identity. Thus, German uses landschaft (countryside or landscape) and ländlich (rural); French uses paysan (country person) and paysage (landscape), which are linked to pays (nation); and Spanish has campestre (rural) and campesino (rural person), linked to campo (field).

Further reading: Bunce (2003), Williams (1973).

On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved centre: of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation. A contrast between country and city, as fundamental ways of life, reaches back into classical times.

(Williams, 1973: 1)

The development of ‘rurality’, or ‘the country’, as an idea in popular culture is discussed further in Chapter 2. For the moment, it is sufficient to note that the binary of ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ has also been incorporated into the organization of geography as an academic discipline, and that the popular cultural associations of the city and the country have been influential in setting the parameters of ‘urban geography’ and ‘rural geography’ and in defining their objects of inquiry.

In the early development of geography as an academic discipline, during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, the study of both the city and the country were linked within the broader approach of ‘regional geography’. This approach sought to describe the geographical characteristics of specified regions and in doing so tended to reproduce popular assumptions about the relationship between the city and the country. Thus, the geographies of rural areas tended to be described and explained in terms of their functional relationship to urban centres as sources of food and natural resources. Attempts were made to convert these popular perceptions into scientific theories by producing general models of the relationships between urban and rural areas, which could in theory be applied to any region. Such models included von Thünen’s concentric model of land use, which mapped out types of farming in relation to the proximity of rural areas to cities (originally designed by a German economist Johann Heinrich von Thünen in 1826, but not translated into English until 1966); and ‘central place theory’ developed by Walter Christaller in 1933 (and modified by August Lösch in 1954) to explain the hierarchy of rural and urban settlements.

In practice, these models failed to capture the diversity and dynamism of rural areas, and frequently did not fit when applied empirically. Nonetheless, they prefigured the development of a new systems-based approach in geography in the 1960s that critiqued regional geography for being overly descriptive and lacking scientific rigour. Applying positivist principles of scientific inquiry and interrogating quantitative data to identify patterns and laws of spatial organization, the new ‘spatial science’ began to focus in on the city as its major object of research (Hubbard, 2006). The emergent ‘urban geography’ concerned itself with mapping and modelling ‘urban systems’, which could extend to and encompass rural areas, but which in effect marginalized the rural as an adjunct to the urban. Significantly, there was no equivalent investigation of ‘rural systems’, but rather the development of a ‘systematic agricultural geography’ that reinforced the association of the rural and farming (Woods, 2009a).

It was not until the early 1970s that an integrated approach to studying ‘rural geography’ was articulated, notably in textbooks by Clout (1972) in Britain, and Hart (1974) in the United States. These books recognized that the rural was more than agriculture, but they nonetheless presented the rural as a coherent and distinctive system, centred on productive land uses. This tension remained apparent in the new ‘rural geography’ that these interventions inspired. On the one hand, rural geography uncritically accepted the existence of ‘rural space’ as a container for the phenomena that they studied, yet, on the other hand, their attempts to distil the essence of the rural, and to authoritatively map the boundaries of rural and urban space, were compromised by methodological problems in fixing the scale of analysis, by the arbitrary spatial units of available data, and by the arbitrary nature of the indicators selected (Cloke, 2006).

Conceptual developments in rural geography

The trajectory followed by rural geography since the 1970s has been strongly influenced by wider conceptual developments in human geography (and in the social sciences more widely), in the shifting focus of its objects of study, in the explanations that it has presented for the processes and phenomena observed, and in its definition of the rural. Early research in rural geography, as described above, followed the principles of positivism, which held that objective facts could be uncovered through empirical inquiry. As such, rural geographers sought to objectively define the rural by searching for the functional characteristics that could be statistically proven to be different from urban characteristics. However, as Cloke (2006) demonstrates, the functional approach was flawed in its assumptions and undermined by its methodological weaknesses. Functional concepts of rurality could describe the characteristics of specific rural spaces and rural societies, but they could not prove that such characteristics were intrinsically rural, or explain how these characteristics shaped the realities of rural life.

The inadequacies of the functional approach were further exposed by the development of a new wave of studies in the 1970s and 1980s that adopted a political-economy approach, influenced by neo-Marxist theories of the operation of capitalism (see Buttel and Newby, 1980; Cloke, 1989a; Woods, 2005a, 2009a). Some of these studies contributed, alongside work in rural sociology, to a political-economy analysis of agriculture that emphasized the structuring of farming as a capitalist industry, subject to the same imperatives for capital accumulation as other industries. There was no place in this perspective for nostalgic a...