4.2 RURALITY AND ITS GEOGRAPHIC AND TEMPORAL VARIABILITY
In order to interpret spatial differentiation, the social sciences have used several criteria, including the urban‐rural divide, altitude, degree of development, politico‐administrative units, labour market basins, and areas of economic exchange (Saraceno 1994). In this study, attention focuses on the meaningfulness and appropriateness of the concept of ‘rural’ and ‘rurality’, as well as on alternative criteria of spatial differentiation which may be useful in the investigation of the two regional case studies of North Karelia and South Tyrol.
Katajamäki (Maaseudun Tulevaisuus 11.02.2011g, 15) claims that “rural researchers have debated the definition of rural probably more than anything else, but in spite of this no unambiguous answer exists”. Furthermore, scholars such as Saraceno (1994) have serious doubts whether such a category of spatial
9 Draghi (2011, 14) claims that “according to some, by separating the notion of sovereignty from that
of territory, the risk of a democratic deficit increases: we could fear the rise of a murky global technocracy, shaped by non‐elected regulators, and thus not subjected to the judgment of its own political constituencies (if not in filtered and substantially ineffective forms).”
differentiation (‘rural’) is useful in all circumstances (or whether it is useful at all).
Halfacree (2006, 45) claims that the term rural is intrinsically geographic:
“quite simply, neither at the official nor at the cultural or popular level is there consensus on the delineation of the ‘non‐urban’ spaces that the term ‘rural’ seeks to encapsulate”. In the geographical context, ‘rural’ includes a variety of spatial imaginaries and everyday practices of the contemporary world, including countryside, wilderness, outback, periphery, farm belt, village, hamlet, bush, peasant society, pastoral, garden, etc. (Halfacree 2006; Cloke 2006). Thus, one of the main challenges in defining the term ‘rural’ lies in its intrinsic spatial as well as temporal variability, which depends on different perceptions and contextual contingencies, including specific locations, economic processes, and social identities (Cloke 2006): “as a matter of fact the definitions given to rurality and its description of rural space change, as does the concept of the rural world itself, as a result of evolutionary processes in the developed countries and with the changing environment of rural territory” (Storti et al. 2004, 4).
According to Vitale (2006), the new political orientation of contemporary society has not been able to produce an accurate definition of what is ‘rural’ or
‘rurality’ in the changed historical circumstances, nor has it been able to grasp its origins, its actors, and the processes of transformation. The representation of the rural lies between a traditional vision that identifies rural society with the
‘countryside’, and the consideration that rural space cannot be defined only with agriculture. In Rural Developments (European Commission, Directorate General for Agriculture 1997), the European Commission argues the impossibility of a universal definition of rurality while shedding light on the diversity of the European countryside.
In the absence of a coherent framework that combines rurality as a representation and rurality as a locality, this concept “is not treated as an object of investigation to formulate possibilities of an endogenous development on the basis of the emerging social needs. Rather, it is treated and discursively created as a field of political intervention subordinated to the logic of profit” (Vitale 2006, 100). The Cork Declaration (European Commission 1996) promotes “local capacity building for sustainable development in rural areas, and, in particular, private and community‐based initiatives which are well‐integrated into global markets”. In this light, Vitale (2006) claims that endogeneity refers to those local resources (human, financial, economic, social, and cultural) which are activated on the basis of their own initiative and strength, rather than counting on public intervention, which is no surprise at the time of the withdrawal of the welfare state. The contribution of the LEADER Programme, for instance, is based on
“the involvement of local actors so that they can reflect on the future of their territory and take responsibility for it” (Comunità Europea 2000), meaning that it is up to these agents to find new local development paths.
Cloke (2006, 18) argues that part of the difficulties in deconstructing the rural lies in its opposition to the urban:
“while cities are usually understood in their own terms, and certainly without any detectable nervousness about defining or justifying that understanding, rural areas represent more of a site of conceptual struggle, where the other‐than‐urban meets the multivarious conditions of vastly differing scales and styles of living”.
In addition, Saraceno (1994) claims that the approach to rural areas assumes both that the differentiation from their urban counterpart is a key one, and that rural economies can be interpreted as homogenous entities which are aggregated for analytical purposes. In reality, since rural areas are increasingly assuming the characteristics of urban areas, and the agricultural base is not as strong as before, such a criterion of spatial differentiation is rather debatable, and it may not be entirely appropriate in those cases where rural areas are fairly heterogenous, as in the case of Italy. Saraceno (1994, 468) very clearly states that
“… if an area has diversified its economic activities either towards manufacturing activities, and/or towards service activities, while maintaining an agricultural structure, to give a rural label to it does not serve any interpretative purpose, and, even worse, to consider such areas as an aggregate category to be read against urban decline or growth, makes the concept misleading and meaningless”.
Within the long‐term dispute on how to define rural (Gilbert 1982), a large variety of definitions of the rural has emerged through academic discourses (ESPON 2006). Reviewing the vast literature on the concept of ‘rural’, in most cases its definitions overlap each other, and although expressed in different ways, they mean the same thing: for the purpose of this study, the approaches by two leading scholars in rural sociology (Halfacree 1993) and rural geography (Cloke 2006) are taken into account. Halfacree (1993) has identified four main approaches in the attempt to define rural by researchers: descriptive definitions, socio‐cultural definitions, the rural as a locality, and the rural as social representation. The main characteristic of descriptive definitions is the distinction between rural and urban areas based on their socio‐spatial characteristics, such as land use, the level of agricultural employment, the density of population, and the extent of built‐up areas. The OECD (2006, 25–26) definition, for instance, is based on settlement structure within a region: “a region is classified predominantly rural if more than 50% of its population lives in rural communities, predominantly urban if less than 15% of the population lives in rural communities, and intermediate if the share of the population living in rural communities is between 15% and 20%”. This explanation of rural, along with the definitions used by individual countries, relies on the assumption that rural regions have low population densities and are located in a region that does
not have a major urban center. According to this definition, more than 75% of the OECD land area is predominantly rural.
Within the descriptive definitions of rurality, the Finnish Rural Policy Committee (2004) defines three main types of rural areas on the basis of their development prospects: 1) urban‐adjacent rural areas, which have the most favourable development prospects, mostly located in southern and western Finland; 2) rural heartland areas, dominated by primary production, whose municipalities are also located in southern and western Finland; and 3) sparsely populated rural areas, affected by negative development trends, mostly located in northern and eastern Finland. For the most part, North Karelia belongs to the latter category. As for Italy, the Strategic National Plan for Rural Development (PSN) (Ministero dello Sviluppo Economico 2007) classifies rural areas on the basis of population density (as is the case of the OECD), altitude, and the degree of local specialization in farming activities. Three main categories are identified:
1) rural regions with specialized intensive agriculture, mostly located in northern and central Italy, close to large urban poles; 2) intermediate rural regions, located in hilly and mountainous areas, which have a highly‐diversified economic base and declining agriculture; and 3) rural regions with development problems, located not only in mountainous and hilly locations, but also on the plains of the south and on the islands. According to this classification, the territory of South Tyrol is considered a rural region with development problems, except for the city of Bolzano/Bozen. These regions suffer from low population densities and difficulties in providing private/public services in comparison to other areas of the country (OECD 2009). Woods (2005) notes that methodological difficulties arise with all the descriptive approaches to define rurality. For instance, wide differences exist when defining the maximum population size of a rural settlement according to the official definitions employed by the different countries. Halfacree (1993, 24) claims that
“descriptive methods only describe the rural, they do not define it themselves”.
The second set of definitions concerns socio‐cultural definitions, which describe rural societies in terms of their difference from urban societies. The assumption is that population density influences behaviour and attitudes (Hoggart & Buller 1987, in Halfacree 1993). In 1938, for instance, Louis Wirth (in Halfacree 1993) associated ‘urbanism’ with dynamicity, mobility, and as an impersonal phenomenon. In contrast, characteristics of ‘ruralism’ are stability, integration, and rigid stratification. Tönnies (1957) characterized the rural in terms of Gemeinschaft (or community), and urban as Gesellschaft (or society). Such socio‐cultural definitions have been designed to explain the transition of European society to industrial modernity in the last two centuries (Granberg &
Kovách 1998); they have also created a sharp distinction between urban and rural. However, it was soon realized that this dichotomy was too simplistic. In consequence, some scholars conceived the rural‐urban continuum idea, highlighting that communities show different degrees of urban and rural
characteristics. Even in this case, the urban‐rural continuum was criticized by scholars like Pahl (1968), and Newby (1986) (both in Halfacree 1993), who discredited it as an over‐simplified concept. The former claimed that the focus should be on the various classes which compose the rural population, rather than focusing on rural areas themselves. The latter in turn argued that “the sociological characteristics of a place could not simply be ‘read off’ from its relative location on a continuum” (Halfacree 1993, 25). The main criticism of both the descriptive and socio‐cultural definitions is that they display an incorrect relationship between space and society. Firstly, space does not have intrinsic causal powers, nor it is the result of the sum of relationships (distances) between objects: “instead, space and spatial relations are both expressions of underlying structures – space is produced – and a means of creating further spaces – space is a resource” (Halfacree 1993, 26).
The third approach emphasizes those processes that might create unique rural localities, as spaces that have a concrete geographic location. Halfacree (1993, 28) argues that “rural localities, if they are to be recognized and studied as categories in their own right, must be carefully defined according to what makes them rural”. This definitional approach demonstrates its weaknesses since
“none of the structural features claimed to be rural could be proven to be uniquely or intrinsically rural” (Woods 2005, 10). An alternative definition of rural is that which defines it as a social representation, based on a progressive de‐spatialization of the concept, as argued by Gray (2000). The issue of defining rurality as a social representation refers to “how people construct themselves as being rural, understanding rurality as a state of mind” (Woods 2005, 11). As a result, rural is not a fixed category; rather, it “becomes a fluid and blurred concept, totally dependent upon context and how the concept is produced and reproduced through social action” (Haugen & Lysgård 2006, 176).
Similarly to Halfacree (1993), Cloke (2006) has recognized three main conceptualizations of rurality. The first, which corresponds to Halfacree’ s descriptive and socio‐cultural definitions, has been defined as functional; the second conceptualization is given by politico‐economic concepts, which delineate the rural in terms of the social production of existence; this second conceptualization is similar to Halfacree rural localities’ definition. The last conceptualization defines the rural as social constructions (Halfacree’s social representations), which are based on “more postmodern and post‐structural ways of thinking” (Cloke 2006, 21). This social construct emerges from competing views of rural space and is the result of negotiation between networks of actors interconnected by power relationships (Storti et al. 2004, 5):
“Rural people, farmers, professionals, academics, policy makers and other actors involved selectively draw upon the reservoir of social representations in justifying, articulating or privileging particular causes, social relations and interests” (Frouws 1998, 56). According to Woods (2005; 2009), within the last decade the dominant approach in rural geography has been to define rurality as
RURAL SPACE Rural locality
Lives of the rural Representation
of the rural
a social construct. If, on the one hand, this approach does not bond the ‘rural’ to geographical space, at the same time, it has become deterritorialized, being less attentive to the material state of the rural, which influences the experiences of people living, working, and playing in rural space (Cloke 2006; Woods 2009).
As a response to the deterritorialization of the term rural, there have been three attempts to ‘rematerialize’ this concept on the basis of three approaches.
The first deals with the material and discursive situations linked with the geographical context of rural localities; for instance, Conradson & Pawson (2009, in Woods 2009) investigate ‘peripherality’ or ‘marginality’ in the light of economic development and identity politics in New Zeland and northern Norway; the second attempt at ‘rematerialization’ stems from the will to define rurality in terms of statistics and, as such, returning to the functional dimension.
The third approach, Woods (2009, 851) claims, deals with “conceptualizing the rural as hybrid and networked space”. This is rooted in two different pathways.
One pathway, traced by Halfacree (2006, 51), is based on the Lefebvrian three‐
fold model of space and is characterized by three different facets: rural localities, which have distinctive spatial practices, and, as such, are characterized either by production or consumption. The second facet is the formal representation of the rural, which is, for instance, expressed by capitalist interests, politicians, or bureaucrats, while the third, everyday lives of the rural, is intrinsically fragmented and incoherent (Figure 7).
Figure 7: The totality of rural space Source: Halfacree (2006, 52)
The second pathway, in contrast, is linked both to actor‐network theory and to Deleuzian ideas, which highlight the rural as a multifaceted and constituted space “defined by networks in which heterogeneous entities are aligned in a variety of ways … [that give] rise to slightly different countrysides…” (Murdoch 2003, 274). To conceptualize the rural as hybrid and networked space is an important theoretical perspective concerning this study and its research questions, because as Woods (2009) remarks, it gives the possibility to complement the materialization of the rural with its social dimensions. The following sections discuss how the various disciplines of rural geography and agricultural geography have different constructions of the rural, and how these representations may, to a varying degree, overlap or take different directions from each other.