Rural Space Research Articles

Revitalising Rural Spaces: Lessons Learnt from Brownfield Regeneration in a Shrinking Region

In the post-socialistic space, old, industrialised regions are not only dealing with problems with the regeneration of industrial brownfields but also with the occurrence of post-agricultural brownfields. The main objective of this paper is to identify and interpret how a successful network of cooperating actors was formed that participated in the process of transforming an agricultural brownfield into a successful rural business zone. From a methodological perspective, the article is based on the findings derived from a set of written memories with ten key actors who were involved in the redevelopment process. The studied regeneration project, which was implemented thanks to the successful cooperation of network of actors both from different hierarchical levels (local, regional and central level) and from the different sectors (public, private and non-profit sector), regenerated an area of 10.4 hectares thanks to both public and private investments of approximately CZK 240 million. Regeneration contributed to the creation of approximately 450 new jobs, and thanks to this project, the population in Třanovice also increased significantly in the transition period (1991–2021), which the studied community positively distinguishes from the shrinking urban centres and rural communities in the post-industrial neighbourhoods.

Including the isolated: Place, rurality, and the state in regional Western Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccine rollout

The rapid transmission of SARS-CoV-2 demonstrated the world's interconnectedness, yet it also highlighted the importance of distance and place in the spread of virus and the distribution, access, and uptake of vaccinations. We examine how people in rural spaces living in a high income country, Australia, thought about the state's governance of them during the pandemic and vaccine rollout, particularly regarding government's responsibility for them as citizens. Utilising interviews with regionally located Western Australians, we explore people's feelings of isolation, otherness, and subordination to governments perceived as distant and disinterested, as well as their sense of safety and seclusion. Distance—physical and imagined—plays a key role in rural understandings of individual-state relations and impacted responses to lockdowns and vaccine eligibility policies. We demonstrate how feelings of political distance and isolation were exacerbated by the pandemic—leading to resistance to government policies—and show how this informed and reflected rural Western Australians' self-understandings. We find that a sense of separation and subordination oriented people towards specific kinds of vaccine behaviours, including ‘constructive deviance’, in which people sought vaccinations on their own terms.

Thoughts on ‘planetary rural geographies’: Commonalties of capitalist development, authoritarian populisms, and energy transition

In contrast to the urban-centric framing of planetary urbanization, the concept of ‘planetary rural geographies’ emphasizes the ongoing importance and distinctiveness of pluriversal rural spaces and identities, including their continued centrality to the global economy. It also argues that rural spaces are especially defined by diverse relationships between the human and non-human that must be understood volumetrically, rather than through largely two-dimensional territorial imaginaries. These themes are developed and illustrated via consideration of contemporary rural geographies as spaces of crisis, spaces of conflict, and spaces of hope. The concept of planetary rural geographies could be enhanced by greater attention to key analytical commonalties among admittedly diverse rural geographies, particularly with respect to broader dynamics of capitalist development and climate change, an effort that could be supported via greater engagement between the literatures on specifically rural geographies, and those on rural populisms, climate adaptation and mitigation, and energy geographies.

Transformación del patrimonio biocultural en el archipiélago de Chiloé: Un Sistema Importante del Patrimonio Agrícola Mundial*

Peasant family farming is characterized by its resilience to change, although it is exposed to drivers of socio-environmental transformation. We study the historical and contemporary drivers of change that have influenced the loss of biocultural heritage in the Rilán peninsula, a rural space in the Chiloe archipelago, in southern Chile that has been recognized by FAO as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System (GIAHS). Between September 2020 and October 2021, through a literature review, farm characterization sheets, and semi-structured interviews, eighteen family farms were visited, and individual conversations were held with a local historian and a rural extensionist in the agricultural field. The results show that, in the Chiloe archipelago, family farming continues to be a fundamental activity in terms of both identity and production, where, despite the changes in rural lifestyles in recent decades, a broad complex of knowledge, practices, and beliefs persists that have withstood rapid processes of agricultural modernization and multiple territorial transformations.

The United Nations Declaration on the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas: possibilities for the formation of a rural Latin-American historic bloc

ABSTRACT Worsening conditions due to the COVID-19 crisis hit rural and agricultural communities in Latin America hard. Paradoxically, this happened when the specific rights of those communities were recognised in a newly adopted international instrument, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants or UNDROP. UNDROP departs from most universal human rights instruments negotiated in the UN by speaking for a group defined by social class and not gender, age, ethnicity, or other categories. In this sense, UNDROP appears to be inspired by a return to class, like instruments negotiated within different international organisations, more precisely the International Labor Organization. The reconsideration of class as a social category is not an endpoint for transnational peasant and agricultural workers’ legal activism; it may create broader spaces for legal mobilisation. Such legal mobilisation may come in the form of class solidarity on issues such as gender in rural spaces, access to seeds and land, or the broader concept of food sovereignty. Nevertheless, historic bloc formation is contentious, and these same issues may be contingent, as exemplified in the Lhaka Honhat Association Case.

Retracted: Water Environment Governance of Urban and Rural Spaces Integrating Natural Ecological Landscape Design Method

Retracted: Water Environment Governance of Urban and Rural Spaces Integrating Natural Ecological Landscape Design Method

Feasting on the land: Haunted political space in recent Welsh language films

This article will focus on spectrality in the cinematic spaces of two Welsh language films, Yr Ymadawiad (The Passing) (2015) and Gwledd (The Feast) (2021). Both films envision spectral happenings as a means of exploring and re-exploring past and present debates about the endlessly contested nature of the Welsh landscape and the resulting hauntological traces within the national psyche. The films suggest contradictory versions of the Welsh landscape. Often described as empty and barren, Wales has simultaneously been seen as a rich resource for extensive extraction of its natural resources. With located hauntings by ghosts that are specific and placed, Yr Ymadawiad’s temporal indeterminacy imagines ghostly presences beneath the waters of a drowned village, while Gwledd depicts the horrific revenge of an earth at the mercy of humans, characterizing human use of rural space as monstrous and destructive. Both films are highly located and rooted within specific Welsh landscapes, depicting both the uniqueness of the Welsh experience and its intimate connection with global issues relating to the loss of land.

The theoretical heritage debate in relation to territorial planning, rural space, and tourism. Heritage as concept, approach, process, and attitude

The theoretical heritage debate in relation to territorial planning, rural space, and tourism. Heritage as concept, approach, process, and attitude

Fairy Tale Sources and Rural Settings in Dario Argento’s Supernatural Horror

This article examines three of Dario Argento’s supernatural horror films (Suspiria, Phenomena, and Dark Glasses) and their use of fairy tale imagery and narratives, which distinguishes them from murder-mystery-oriented giallo films. In them, Argento locates his characters, rather than in urban environments, in rural spaces (forests, fields, mountains) where the supernatural elements of their stories blossom. Suspiria represents a primarily aesthetic exploration of parallels between fairy tales and contemporary horror, while Phenomena uses these two modes to examine the conflict between the rational and irrational, the natural and the supernatural. Dark Glasses initially appears to be one of his more traditional gialli, but it abandons these tropes with a simplified plot evoking the story of “Little Red Riding Hood”; this shift is accomplished by moving the action of the film out of Rome and into the dark forests of the countryside. Dark Glasses, I argue, therefore represents a self-conscious move to unite in a single film the two major strands of Argento’s filmography and to expose some fundamental elements of his general cinematic approach—namely, the unique capacity of stylized aesthetics and irrational elements to convey the experience of very real, human terror and evil.

Concluding remarks

Concluding this issue of Sociolinguistic Studies on the crossing of the urban-rural border or divide in Linguistic Landscape research, this article takes up the questions formulated in the opening contribution by Yao and Xu. It thus addresses communicative affordances of rural vs. urban spaces, and sign-making and sign usage in rural areas. Drawing on the findings of the four studies from the Asian Pacific and Oceania included in this issue as well as the work by Charles Goodwin, this article suggests that Linguistic Landscape research of rural areas could pay more attention to how social practices of people build on each other, reuse the material culture accumulated in an environment by their predecessors and in this way develop certain types of infrastructure for its population, which changes the nature of rural space.

Theories and practices of comprehensive land consolidation in promoting multifunctional land use

Rapid urbanization requires comprehensive land consolidation to manage multifunctional land use. The promotion of multifunctional land use is an effective rural development strategy for upgrading comprehensive land consolidation and stimulating rural vitalization. This study attempts to illustrate the connotation and characteristics of comprehensive land consolidation and reveal the driving mechanism in promoting multifunctional land use. This was achieved by constructing a complete process analysis framework of comprehensive land consolidation and using the town of Hemudu in Zhejiang province, a comprehensive land consolidation pilot area, as a case study. Land use practices in Hemudu were examined, and the impact of comprehensive land consolidation on multifunctional land use was measured quantitatively. The results show that comprehensive land consolidation is characterized by meeting multiple needs, taking diversified engineering measures, and increasing efficient function supply to address the issues caused by the mismatch between the supply and demand of land use functions. These strategies contribute to a continuous process of land use transition in the consolidation area and help to achieve balanced and healthy ecological elements, optimal landscape structures, realized land value, enhanced function supply, and empowered rural culture. The implementation process in the pilot area was complex and systematic, from the integration of rural space to the improvement of villagers’ quality of life, and finally, to the restoration and protection of the ecological environment. Overall, the implementation promoted multifunctional land use in Hemudu but the imbalance between different functions still exists and is significant. Concerning the improvement of land use function, optimal paths are proposed to guide rational and scientific comprehensive land consolidation practices in the future.

Energy Efficiency in Agricultural Production—Experience from Land Consolidation in Poland and Finland

Land consolidation in rural areas is greatly influenced by a number of social, agricultural, and economic factors. They extend the time and complicate activities related to the implementation of this project. Land consolidation is a huge investment, requiring a good and up-to-date map. Up-to-date data that reflects reality are the basis for good and efficient land consolidation in rural areas. To improve the creation of a land consolidation project, the most appropriate solution would be to place all the necessary data to create a land consolidation project on “geoportals” websites. Providing data on the websites of geoportals in Poland and Finland in the form of a map portal would enable both visual and substantive analysis of spatial changes in rural areas. Therefore, this article pursues two main scientific goals. The first purpose of this article is to analyze the history and scope of land consolidation in Poland and Finland in order to learn the specifics of land consolidation in a given country. Comparisons and analyses were made on the basis of the authors’ experience in Poland and Finland with land consolidation in the areas described. The second scientific goal of the article is to compare the availability of geospatial data in the context of the methodology of performing land consolidation in rural areas, which leads to increased energy efficiency in agricultural production by reducing the need for energy, especially fuel for agricultural machinery. The results from the table with a list of geoportals in Poland and Finland are a summary of the data available for free. Thanks to it, land consolidation contractors around the world will have the opportunity to familiarize themselves with and perhaps use this data when creating a rural land consolidation project. Good land consolidation planning will lead to effective and economical use of rural space. This is part of the 2030/2050 strategy. Reducing agricultural production costs, lower fuel consumption, and a smaller carbon footprint. This is what Poland and Finland are striving for as countries belonging to the European Union.

Effect of e-commerce popularization on farmland abandonment in rural China: Evidence from a large-scale household survey

Uncertainty in the food supply continues to increase due to COVID-19 and geopolitical conflicts, and reducing farmland abandonment is an important measure for ensuring food security. In recent years, the Chinese government has promoted e-commerce demonstration projects in rural areas, so we ask does the spread of e-commerce reduce farmland abandonment? This study first constructs a theoretical framework for the effect of e-commerce on farmland abandonment and then quantifies that effect through spatial analysis and econometric models based on 12,732 households in the China Rural Household Panel Survey (CRHPS). The study found that there was a significant spatial aggregation between the popularization of e-commerce and the distribution of abandoned farmland, with a significant negative correlation between these two factors. The popularization of e-commerce has reduced farmland abandonment. The probability and size of farmland abandonment by farmers dropped by 4.1 % and 17.5 % when e-commerce was promoted in a village; the probability and size of farmland abandonment by farmers dropped by 7.8 % and 38.7 % when the rate of the popularization for e-commerce in villages increased by 1 %, respectively. E-commerce can reduce farmland abandonment in rural areas by absorbing returning labour, stimulating the land transfer market and revitalizing rural industry. With the improvement of physical infrastructure such as rural roads, the government should pay attention to the construction of digital villages including e-commerce infrastructure and continue to innovate new ways small farmers to participate in e-commerce, thus helping transform rural spaces and reusing idle land resources.

Problemzone Ostdeutschland

Abstract By analyzing Lukas Rietzschel’s novel Mit der Faust in die Welt schlagen (2018) and Nino (f.k.a. Paula) Bulling’s Comic Im Land der Frühaufsteher (2012), this article explores contemporary portrayals of “East German rural space” against the backdrop of current discourses on Germany’s postmigrant condition. Marginalized on a political, economic and symbolic level and construed as the “Other” of German majority society in mainstream media, the “rural East” has recently been discovered by artists as a medium to reflect on urbanormative and (post-)colonial structures of representation that shape the debate and discursive construction process of postmigrant realities. In order to further illuminate this unique position and potential of East German rural space in art and postmigrant discourse, this paper will explore issues of migration, belonging, and (East German) identity in the abovementioned works through the lens of postcolonial theory.

Trauma-Competent Approaches for Supporting Rural Students of Color

Rurality is a context, often overlooked by research and society, where trauma exposure is a prevalent feature in many young people’s lives. Rural Students of Color experience trauma at higher rates compared to rural White students. In turn, school systems must respond with trauma-competent systems of support to build protective factors for students. The purpose of this article is to discuss the history and modern trauma-informed practices and ways to begin shifting our mindset and language to better support rural Students of Color by understanding the historical and present contexts and trauma that influence their experiences. Furthermore, this article will highlight the needs of Students of Color in rural spaces as well as applications for trauma-competency within the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) model. Strategies for building connectedness and implementing anti-racist social-emotional learning will be identified. Additionally, implications for rural school leaders, school counselors, and school-based mental health professionals, and further research will be discussed.

Tourists’ perceptions of wind turbines: conceptualizations of rural space in sustainability transitions

Concerns about the effects of climate change have led to an interest in identifying ways to foster sustainability transitions. In the Global North, a key approach is to eventually eliminate dependence on carbon emitting energy while moving towards renewable sources, including wind power. Since wind farms require vast amounts of land, inevitably this explains the presence of such installations in many rural regions. This situation has alarmed various stakeholders, including those involved in tourism, who see such developments as threats to idyllic notions of rurality and, by default, to the transformation of the countryside for visitor experiences. Through a series of case studies in rural Sweden, we explore the attitudes of tourists towards the presence of wind farms in the landscape. Overall, study respondents recognize the need for such installations since most accept the necessity to embark on sustainable energy transitions. In this way, they understand that many parts of rural Sweden are transforming into spaces where sustainable energy future must be negotiated. Ultimately, sustainability transitions lead to the rethinking of conventional perceptions around rural space and tourism. We suggest that geographical research on sustainability transitions in tourism should account for conceptions of rurality that involve assemblages of imagination, place framing, and power relations in sustainability transitions. This conceptualization is necessary for achieving just and sustainable energy futures.

Do Local Socio-Economic Structures Determine the Spatial Distribution of Human Capital? Analysis of Connections for Rural Areas in Poland

The article has an empirical nature. The subject of detailed analysis is the variations in spatial distribution of human capital in rural areas of Poland and the analysis of the correlation of this phenomenon with local structures of the socio-economic development process. The diagnosis and assessment of variations in the spatial distribution of human capital were performed based on an author’s indicator—a synthetic measure of human capital level (HCI—human capital index). The characterisation of local socio-economic structures was based on the typology of rural areas according to Rural Development Monitoring (RDM 2014 and 2023). The study was conducted for rural areas in Poland defined by the Main Statistical Office based on the administrative criteria of rural and rural-urban municipalities. A total of 2172 municipalities were covered by the study. The data analysis was conducted spatially at the NUTS 5 level and comparatively at the NUTS 2 level for the years 2013–2018. The assumption was verified that the processes of human capital concentration in rural areas in Poland are related to local socio-economic structures of development processes, and the local structure factor that influences the existing differences is the degree of use of agricultural functions. The results of statistical tests positively verify this relationship as statistically significant. Moreover, the article provides strong arguments for shaping regional and rural policy and its implementation. The assumption about the need to change the approach to the study of rural space was positively verified; it is suggested to move away from analyses conducted at the level of the NUTS 2 region to the level of the NUTS 5 municipality. Research on rural areas makes sense only from a local perspective; it allows for a more accurate illustration of the specificity of local communities, revealing their development potentials and barriers, and, as a result, more effective programming of instruments supporting local development, dedicating specific support programs individually for each municipality, while the regional approach presents the state of differences too generally and may often lead to incorrect interpretation. In the empirical part of the article, taxonomic methods of hierarchy (patternless) and classification of multi-featured objects were used. As a result, each object (municipality) was assigned a synthetic measure—the relative human capital level index (HCI). Based on the HCI index, an ex-post hierarchical classification of municipalities was carried out. The main sources of data (diagnostic variables) for the construction of the HCI index were the Local Data Bank of the Central Statistical Office (BDL GUS), the national census of NSP 2011, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Family and Social Policy, and District Examination Boards. The source of data on local socio-economic structures expressed based on the typology of rural areas according to the Rural Development Monitoring (RDM) methodology was the European Fund for the Development of Polish Villages (EFRWP).

YOUNG PEOPLE AND FAMILY RURAL PROPERTIES IN THE WEST REGION OF PARANÁ

In this article, we investigated how young people in the municipality of Assis Chateaubriand perceive the rural space and family rural property succession. The municipality of analysis has traditionally used land for agricultural production, and as a result, its economic development is influenced by it. A questionnaire was used to collect data from 153 young people from the municipality ranging in age from 14 to 29. To obtain the results, several steps were taken, including descriptive statistics, factor analysis, and content analysis. We found that young people do not see themselves as essential elements for the continuity of the family's rural property. In this sense, it is necessary to develop activities that encourage dialogues on the succession process in rural properties in the region, on the initiative of public or private agents

Spatial–Temporal Characteristics of Carbon Emissions in Mixed-Use Villages: A Sustainable Development Study of the Yangtze River Delta, China

With the progression of novel urbanization, rural regions are increasingly characterized by mixed-use features, where work and living activities intersect, resulting in a significant surge in per capita carbon emissions. This research article aims to elucidate the spatio-temporal relationship of carbon emissions in rural areas and their association with mixed-use intensity from a sustainable development perspective. For the study, we selected four of the most representative mixed-use village types in the Yangtze River Delta region. Using the STING method, each rural space was delineated into micro-level mixed-use units. Subsequently, a quantitative evaluation model was constructed to gauge the relationship between mixed-use intensity and carbon emissions. This was complemented by employing GIS simulations to analyze the spatio-temporal attributes of carbon emissions in mixed-use villages. Our findings indicate that (1) different types of villages display considerable disparities in mixed-use intensity and carbon emissions. Their correlation also varies significantly, with traditional agricultural villages exhibiting the lowest values of 0.338 and 0.356, while E-commerce-centric villages recorded the highest at 0.674 and 0.653. (2) The carbon emissions of rural units manifest diverse patterns that include dispersed distribution, core aggregation, linear decay, and dissipative fragmentation. These correspond to traditional agriculture, industrial production, tourism service, and E-commerce villages, respectively. (3) The carbon emissions of mixed-use villages exhibit cyclical fluctuations over time, with different magnitudes observed across villages. Traditional agricultural villages display the smallest fluctuations (within 30%), while those centered around tourism services can experience fluctuations exceeding 150%. Building on these insights, we delved deep into the challenges faced by each village type in enhancing the quality of work and living while concurrently achieving energy conservation and emission reduction. Based on these aspects, we propose a sustainable low-carbon development pathway tailored for mixed-use villages.

‘Now there’s just a different feel’: spatiotemporal commitments & commercial racialization as markers of rural belonging

ABSTRACT Twenty-first century rural Midwest communities are experiencing demographic shifts and industrialization in ways that challenge assumptions about rural social cohesion. Urban spatial segregation, surveillance of immigrants and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of colour) city dwellers, and community organizing to resist these processes is well represented in social science literature. Rural contexts feature less prominently in such explorations. I draw on ethnographic research in a Midwest community to make visible the racialization of rural spaces and to illustrate how such racialization frames belonging as contingent on assimilation to white investments in rural space. I draw on the examples of homeownership, commercial space, and public gathering spaces to illustrate the prevalence of white, Euro-American spatiotemporal commitments at work in rural communities as well as how this hegemonic framework can be challenged. By laying bare the social processes enacted through the geographies of everyday life, I hope to point towards more capacious and inclusive possibilities of rural belonging.