Commentary: scale, rent, and symbolic capital: political economy and emerging rural landscapes

Abstract

The papers collected here demonstrate that rural landscapes around the world are increasingly entering into global-scale circuits of capital accumulation and circulation for purposes other than the conventional ones of raw materials, cheap labor and agricultural commodities. Although the concepts of ‘‘exurbia’’ and ‘‘amenity migration’’ remain to be further specified, it is clear that emerging rural landscapes are an important and vast field for empirical and theoretical research. Four common threads run through the diverse cases presented here: (1) fictitious commodification of nature by capital, in various and novel forms that interact with each other and with antecedent forms; (2) the importance of the category of rent (both actual and potential) to understand these processes adequately; (3) the increasing scale, rate, and magnitude of capital production and circulation as drivers that widen the ‘‘rent gap’’ in rural areas; and (4) the symbolic character of capital invested in amenity forms of uneven development. What frequently results are cultural, political, economic and environmental struggles between ‘‘locals’’ and the bearers of extra-local capital, mediated in complex ways by the tension between simple speculation and more persistent varieties of migration. These struggles are the central research challenge that these papers reveal. Rural landscapes around the world have been subject to international capital flows for hundreds of years. What is new in recent decades, as demonstrated by the papers collected here, are the goals of these investments: no longer limited to raw materials, cheap labor and agricultural commodities, global capital now seeks out rural sites for tourism, residential development, luxury homes, environmental conservation, and speculation in all of these. These phenomena pose serious challenges not only to the residents and landscapes of rural areas, but also to conventional notions of development, capital, and ‘‘the rural’’ as a category. It should be emphasized at the outset that these processes both presuppose and reinforce global patterns of inequality and uneven development. The cases examined in this collection reveal widespread and novel phenomena—this is what makes them important and exciting. The larger picture remains stubbornly continuous, however, with the patterns and processes of uneven development witnessed since the emergence of capitalism. The widening disparity of wealth both within and among countries over the past 35 years must be recognized as a fundamental condition of possibility for the advent of most, if not all, of the new rural landscapes analyzed in these papers. Perhaps this goes without saying, but it should not be forgotten. The concepts of exurbia and amenity migration remain rather underspecified at this point, but the papers assembled here provide an opportunity to N. F. Sayre (&) Department of Geography, University of California, 507 McCone Hall #4740, Berkeley, CA 94720-4740, USA e-mail: nsayre@berkeley.edu